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.

This can mean that an existing WAN can support many users, new additional applications can be rolled out and an expensive bandwidth upgrade can be deferred – in some cases by up to five years. In addition, investment in a WAN optimisation solution can enable enterprises to realise substantial cost savings in other ways, including:

• Consolidate Infrastructure into the Datacentre – Organisations can remove much of the IT infrastructure, such as file and email servers, SMS servers, SharePoint servers, tape autoloaders, network attached storage (NAS) and remote office backup systems that sit in branch offices—without impacting application performance.

• Optimise Disaster Recovery – Performance of a disaster recovery site can be improved, resulting in cost savings for organisations and data backups can be performed in a more frequent and reliable manner

• Enabling Greater Collaboration – employees can share large files regardless of where they are located, resulting in more productive users

• Reduce RPO – Backups and replication can be performed over long distance WAN links and completed during backup windows that were previously unachievable

WAN optimisation is a key tool for distributed organisations. WAN traffic can be reduced, application performance can be significantly improved, and IT infrastructure consolidation, and backup & recovery projects can be implemented. WAN optimisation has enabled many companies to get more out of their existing infrastructure and at the same time enabled them to avoid or delay costly bandwidth upgrades.
In this way, management can minimise the load on, and accelerate applications across, the WAN. As a result, employees can become more productive and much less frustrated as they are able to access business-critical applications without experiencing slow performance.

In summary, the BT infinity announcement should be seen as a good thing. After all, allocating additional bandwidth to businesses won’t hurt. However, although all organisations want additional bandwidth to access applications that are critical to their business, companies may want to stop and consider the overall performance of their network resources and look at pragmatic ways in which to manage this process through WAN optimisation technologies. Above all, to increase work productivity amongst their employees, organisations must ensure that speed and performance of business essential application traffic is a top priority too.