The need for speed: Does faster broadband really mean faster applications?

Advice 2010-08-10 12:45

Riverbed’s Mark Lewis says that while the BT infinity announcement is a good thing, organisations should consider the

Following the launch of BT’s Infinity superfast broadband service for home users and businesses, Riverbed’s EMEA marketing director Mark Lewis explores why it’s not just about additional bandwidth, and why poor performance of business-critical applications across the network still needs to be addressed.

To infinity and beyond?
Following BT’s pledge to provide home users and businesses with 40MB broadband by 2012, IT managers from organisations of all sizes may be forgiven for thinking that with this additional bandwidth capacity, the demands of running resource heavy applications across their networks will ease. However, IT managers that adopt this belief soon discover the harsh truth that bandwidth isn’t always the clear and simple answer to improving application performance over the wide area network (WAN).

Distributed organisations, regardless of size, rely upon the WAN to connect their branch office locations to a corporate data centre or centralised location. The problem with delivering IT resources over the WAN is that many organisations don’t know why the distributed nature of their business dramatically increases the complexity of the way files and data are dealt with. In addition, individuals can be blissfully unaware of the performance implications that running resource heavy applications such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle or Microsoft Exchange has on a company’s WAN. Poor application performance can be a common by-product experienced by users accessing data over the WAN, resulting in reduced productivity and frustration for employees and IT managers alike.

When users complain of poor application performance, one of the first moves organisations often make is to look to upgrade bandwidth. However, CIOs often discover that upgrading bandwidth to remote sites has little or no effect on application performance, and doesn’t solve the performance problem. This is because performance problems are often the result of latency and application protocol inefficiencies across the WAN, rather than constrained bandwidth.

What can organisations do to increase performance of business critical applications?
The good news for CIOs is that there are different approaches that IT managers can take to accelerate applications for business use and to prevent network congestion. In the past, organisations have taken the approach of either attempting to block web access to all known sites that can restrict the performance of business critical applications or to simply re-order the priority of traffic through the use of a quality or service (QoS) mechanism. However, by deploying WAN optimisation, IT managers can improve application performance across the network typically by five to 50 times - in some cases up to 100 times – and can simultaneously reduce bandwidth utilisation by 65 to 95 percent.