The Network Manager s Guide to Application SLA Assurance

Transcription

1 Whitepaper: The Network Manager s Guide to Application SLA Assurance -1-

2 Executive Summary With the distributed, collaborative nature of work today, your workforce has never been more dependent on applications and devices to be productive. But that productivity is firmly predicated on having a reliable predictable network that knits together people in any location and at any time. The challenge for network managers of assuring a consistently productive user experience is compounding rapidly, as the demands of mobility, the cloud, video and real-time applications redefine the IT landscape. Outgrowing Bandwidth The sheer volume of data growth is outpacing innovation in bandwidth delivery. User Experience #1 For real time, mobile and cloud applications, user experience is more important than speed. Content vs. Context The more complexity in users, devices and applications the more context of use is critical. Ultimately the challenge is to deliver against network service-level agreements (SLAs) so you can guarantee a predictable experience for your most critical applications and your most important users. In order to provide a convenient, productive work environment in 2013, network managers need to be able to cut through the complexity and easily monitor, control and optimize the quality of the user experience and application service levels across all networks. Network managers and administrators should read this whitepaper to learn about the key drivers that demand a mindset shift from application delivery to application assurance for Understand the scope of the challenge, learn how top organizations are finding success with application SLA assurance, and get five steps to get you started on your journey. The Network Manager s Job Is Becoming More Difficult The network manager s job, once derided as the overseer of IT plumbing, has fundamentally changed. You are more important than ever but as Spider-Man taught us with great power comes great responsibility. You must deliver a consistently reliable experience to a variety of constituents who expect a speedy, always-on connection to the network. And most importantly, you must meet application SLAs that are necessary for your company to compete and thrive. FTP Web P2P Video Content Collaboration With multiple new technology forces on a collision course in your network, your job is getting more complex. Server virtualization and the shift to the cloud, the explosion of the mobile workforce, a torrent of streaming media, and the move to unified communications have placed unrelenting pressure on the network you re trying to manage Bandwidth usage is growing by orders of magnitude, but in many cases the cost of quality WAN bandwidth seems to be exempt from Moore s Law. Not that buying more bandwidth actually solves the problem, even if unlimited IT budgets were a reality. Your users will consume as much bandwidth as you give them. -1-

3 Balancing the performance of a variety of applications over the same network infrastructure and meeting users expectations for a quality experience has never been more difficult. The task of application SLA assurance has become far more difficult for several reasons: Application Protocols Just a few years ago, business applications were predominately client/server oriented, which was challenging for network managers, but it was a single variable problem. File sharing and applications based upon protocols such as CIFS and MAPI were not designed to perform across low-latency WANs, which is problematic for performance. Problematic, yes. Complex, no. The solution has been well-addressed by most all WAN Optimization products. The real challenge of the day is that today s networks support many different types of applications with different behaviors and protocols, and that makes it much more difficult for you to optimize the experience for your users. As your users rely more on unified communications and collaboration tools, can you balance the differing demands of UDP and TCP traffic on your network from end to end? As public Internet becomes the predominant network transport for your applications can you differentiate between critical and recreational traffic? Application Hosting Even as companies consolidated data centers and virtualized servers for improved efficiency, applications were largely hosted on-premise five years ago. But today the challenge of application delivery is multi-dimensional because application hosting is so variable. A typical organization has some applications on-premise, while others are in private clouds, others are managed by providers, and yet others live in the public Internet. The challenge for network managers is to meet SLAs for applications that could be hosted on one network today and another tomorrow. And this problem will only get more complex as we start to plan for software-defined networking (SDN). How will cloud bursting impact your ability to protect application SLAs when your applications are in constant motion across different networks and environmental conditions? Universal Access At most companies, employees, customers and partners alike need access to applications and resources on the corporate network. They also access the network from different devices laptops, tablets, and smartphones and sometimes at all at the same time. For network managers, the challenge is to understand and segment users at a more granular level and to assure a consistent experience for all tiers of users while consistently enforcing security and compliance policies. Networks must be able to dynamically tailor the service to the specific user, device and location at the moment the service is delivered and likewise adjust service levels for applications competing for the same network resource. How do you assure application SLAs when the access locations and access devices expand exponentially? Application Workloads Your network is a much more important component in the typical business application workload than it used to be. Applications and by extension your business simply can t function without a reliable, predictable network infrastructure. Compared to even five years ago, the typical business application depends much more on network conditions and performance for meeting SLAs. A growing percentage of our applications are now cloudbased or accessed from remote sites, which means you can t treat application performance problems without considering the network in But now your network is truly critical to business operations, you must proactively monitor, manage and remediate application performance with the network in mind, to ensure that the flow of business is uninterrupted. How does your network monitoring and management toolkit address this change in application workloads? -2-

4 Application Visibility In 2013, application traffic can camouflage itself. Without sophisticated network visibility, we are challenged to differentiate one type of Internet application traffic from another and that can put our networks at risk and our SLAs in jeopardy. Even great network managers with monitoring tools in place can be simply unaware of dozens or more of applications and traffic types that are running on their networks. For example, the prevalence of cloaked web traffic presents new challenges for identifying the true sources of traffic. And while identifying malicious traffic is certainly critical, identifying wasteful, although not life-threatening traffic is no less important for your long term business success. An example that comes up over and over focuses on social media, because it is now strategic for many companies. YouTube, Facebook and other social-media applications can be used for strategic business one minute and to waste time the next. You need the ability to understand which applications running over the network so you can better manage and report on them. Quantifying the Assurance Challenge There s no doubt today s networks are subject to unrelenting pressures. According to Aberdeen Research, half of organizations have seen more than a 25% increase in network traffic, and 15% of those have seen their network traffic increase by more than 100%. 1 Aberdeen s research also indicates that the top performance challenges for enterprises are: the network doesn t support planned growth and over-utilization of network resources. The traditional approach has been to increase network capacity and focus on optimizing application traffic efficiency. But to fluidly adapt to a changing mix of applications, exploding traffic loads and demanding users, network managers need to shed the old-school approach. You need to shift your focus to the quality of the user experience. TRAC Research underscores this point by stating IT Organizations are five times more likely to cite user experience as the primary network driver than throughput. 2 Forrester Research describes the user experience network (uxn) as it advises IT managers to focus on their network strategy on user experience, not application delivery. 3 uxn, according to Forrester is: A network architecture that focuses on monitoring, controlling, and optimizing the quality of the user experience. We know that user experience in 2013 is the driving force for network managers. Yet user experience is both more difficult than ever to assure due to network complexity and more expensive than ever to deliver due to bandwidth cost and content expansion. As network managers, we must focus our efforts on application SLAs as the atomic unit of measure of success. Our ability to monitor, control and optimize the quality of the user experience and meet the SLA will determine our collective fates moving forward. The next question becomes, how do the most successful companies and IT organizations address this challenge and what are their secrets to success? How Organizations Meet the SLA Assurance Challenge Let s look at how three top organizations are meeting the SLA assurance problem set by leveraging greater network visibility, control and optimization for all traffic types and user segments. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the City of Richmond in Northern California and European ice cream maker R&R Manufacturing started down the road to success by focusing monitoring and management on user experience vs. throughput The Changing Face of Network Performance, Aberdeen Group, October WAN Optimization Spectrum Report TRAC Research, October Focus Your Network Strategy on User Experience, Not Application Delivery, Forrester Research, February 2011

5 UMass Dartmouth gains greater visibility and control over collaborative and recreational applications UMass Dartmouth faced a very common application SLA challenge for education institutions, which will become more prevalent in commercial enterprises as they embrace bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies as a standard practice. With students use of mobile devices and highbandwidth Internet applications on the rise, the IT staff was struggling to find network capacity and to control the share of network resources being consumed by students over administration and faculty. The objective became how to control the amount of recreational content on the network and deliver an equitable share of resources to each user segment. The university s approach to solving the problem started by segmenting all users into Students, Faculty, Administration and Guests and then assigning a share of resources to each segment across times of day and days of the week. Secondly, IT classified previously unclassified traffic and tiered it in terms of priority. Netflix, for example, was classified as recreational. This segmentation and classification approach with the Exinda Network Control Suite allowed the IT organization to guarantee bandwidth to critical learning applications while containing the impact of applications like Netflix that were putting the network at risk. IT can now confidently deliver SLAs for their learning apps while delivering a fair share of network resources to students so they can enjoy a social experience at school. Without Exinda, we do not have a functioning network. It s what saves our bacon every day. Rich Pacheco, Network Systems Manager, UMass Dartmouth The City of Richmond (Calif.) assures application access and gains control of recreational traffic As with many cities, the government offices, public safety department, public works buildings and recreational facilities are widely spread out. Many locations use T1 or DSL to connect to the city s core network, and these links can bog down with employees watching YouTube and other recreational Internet activities. Simple tasks like opening documents, sending and accessing the Internet can quickly become frustrating and productivity is lost. The City of Richmond wanted to ensure that its workers were productive without having to invest more in WAN bandwidth. The city used Exinda s WAN Optimization and Network Control solutions to put policy-based controls in place to ensure that IP voice calls and business applications were given priority treatment on the network, while the recreational use of the Internet was limited. Building a policy library based on user experience allowed the organization to meet application SLAs. We do not get calls about slowness anymore. With Exinda in place, all of the network issues we used to have simply do not exist anymore. Henry Lei, Network Manager, City of Richmond -4-

6 Ice cream maker R&R Manufacturing assures a good experience when using web-based applications Employees at R&R Ice Cream, Europe s largest ice cream maker for take-home products, were growing increasingly frustrated by sluggish access to web-based applications and files. Like many IT organizations, R&R IT team struggled to solve the application performance issue for workers in branch offices. IT needed to find a way to assure the performance of its web-based business applications for branchoffice workers. It started by gaining greater visibility into actual application usage, so it could identify work-related vs. recreational applications. Real-time network performance data from Exinda added another layer of visibility. Armed with information, the IT team could create policies to prioritize VoIP, ERP and other business applications, while limiting recreational traffic, such as social media and streaming video. As a result, it was able to improve the performance of key applications, reduce application and file sharing traffic, and avoid WAN bandwidth upgrades. I was pleased that I could deploy the Exinda devices from day one alongside the MPLS installations. Without Exinda, I don t think our implementation of the MPLS network would have gone as smoothly. Jonathan Aldred, Group IT Infrastructure Manager, R&R Ice Cream Five Steps to Application SLA Assurance Network managers need a plan for application SLA assurance that treats the network as a key component of the application workload. As we ve discussed, this requires a shift in mindset for all of us. Here are five tips we ve taken from interviews with our 3,000 customers that you can use to build and execute your 2013 Application SLA Assurance Plan. 1. Prioritize your Top 10 Strategic Applications and set user experience SLAs for each. Create a shortlist of your top 10 applications that your business depends on most. Once you have a list you can define key performance indicators for each in terms of application responsiveness and performance. For most companies, you ll have ERP, , CRM and other enterprise applications at the top of this list, whether they are running in your data center or in the cloud. But increasingly we also see real-time applications such as voice, collaboration and videoconferencing on the top 10 list. Even social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter can be strategic especially for those working in the marketing department. Once the top 10 list is in place, it s easy to focus your team on the SLAs that matter most for your business and not get bogged down by sifting through log files and lists of IP addresses and protocols. 2. Identify your Top 5 Negative Applications and set bandwidth ceilings for each. Make a list of the five applications that cause you the most headaches the ones that are draining your enterprise network and putting your budget at risk. This list is typically contains Internet video, peer-to-peer, rich media and other Internet applications. For some companies, it might also include social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Once you ve created your list, you can put limits around how much bandwidth users can consume at different times of day, days of the week and for different users and user segments. For example, you might want to allow all users in the Marketing department to use YouTube during the day, but for the rest of the company only at night. With the right controls in place, your users can still make use of the Internet and social content without it compromising the Finance department s ability to close the quarter on time. -5-

7 3. Categorize your applications in terms of Business Priority Tiers. If your network is a highway, then decide which applications get access to the fast lane, such as voice and transactions, while replication and backup move steadily along in the slow lane. In this case, we re not talking so much about negative applications vs. strategic applications but rather tiers of strategic traffic. An example could be controlling how much bandwidth you give to data replication traffic during the day so it doesn t compete with your key business productivity traffic during business hours. By classifying your applications into priority tiers, you can ensure that the most important applications get their fair share of bandwidth, without starving other important applications. The result is that you can guarantee SLAs for your critical applications with a new level of confidence. 4. Break down your top application types in terms of Real-Time and Static. Voice, videoconferencing, transactions and other real-time applications are unforgiving of network delays. , backups and web traffic, among other applications, are far more tolerant in terms of the tangible impact on user experience. Profiling your traffic in this way allows you to build and manage network policies and ultimately application SLAs more effectively. 5. Build a User Experience Dashboard linked to your corporate directory. The best way to truly understand your users experiences is to see what they see. Build a user experience dashboard that categorizes user segments, application tiers, and the response times of those applications. When you have the tools to monitor network performance by user, application, device and location, then you can easily compare against best practice benchmarks and identify key trends and address issues before your users call the support desk. Get Visibility, Control and Optimization with Exinda Exinda is focused on assuring user experience so that applications can be delivered to anyone, at any time and in any place with a predictable quality of experience. Thousands of organizations around the world have assured a better experience for their users, reduced IT cost and optimized network performance with Exinda WAN Optimization and Network Control Integrated Suite. With Exinda, the performance of business-critical applications is assured, while social media, gaming, video and other Internet traffic are prevented from putting your network and your business at risk. About Exinda Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN Optimization and Network Control solutions. Exinda enables organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN Optimization and Internet Control that intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 2,500 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. -6- For more information, please visit Copyright 2013, Exinda Networks Inc. WhitePaper_NetworkManagerGuideSLA_v_2_13_US