harris.com Is Video Consuming Your Network?

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1 harris.com Is Video Consuming Your Network?

2 Maintaining Network Performance in spite of a Data Traffic Deluge What would it cost your company if the enterprise IT network was down for an hour? What if it was down for a day? How badly would it disrupt operations? Would you be able to ship goods, execute financial transactions or keep your production line running? What if it wasn t down, but merely slow? Would that have a material impact on your business? Would you get a flood of calls to your help desk? The enterprise communications network is literally the organizational nerve center. Not much works without it. If it slows, the entire business slows. These impacts have hard dollar costs as well as ripple effects of lost productivity, rework and customer irritation. Modern networks transport a plethora of application data, including business-to-consumer and business-to-business transactions, back-office applications and delay-sensitive communications such as real-time voice. Bandwidth-intensive applications, especially high-quality video, stretch network capabilities and resources, but also complement and enhance business processes. Business-critical applications require networks that provide guaranteed services that are secure, predictable and measurable. These factors lead many organizations to get on the network bandwidth upgrade treadmill hoping that more bandwidth will translate into less risk. However, upgrades are often done without network optimization techniques that enable organizations to maximize their enterprise network potential and long-term reliability. Network Gridlock: The Emerging Video Traffic Jam Your enterprise network is facing an onslaught of demand from resource-hungry technologies from Service-Oriented-Architectures (SOA) to Cloud Computing. Mobile devices are popping up everywhere and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is quick to follow. While these technologies are creating significant challenges for network planners everywhere, the true culprit bringing the enterprise network to its knees is the explosion of video traffic. Video Everywhere The explosion of video within the enterprise is having an enormous impact on corporate network performance. Many organizations do not realize the amount of video they are transmitting across their network today. Others don t recognize how integral video is becoming in day-to-day business operations. Video traffic includes everything from desktop video conferencing to corporate communications, marketing materials and online training. Organizations tend to levy training requirements to all users simultaneously, multiplying the bandwidth impact. The video based training has more impact and costs less than alternative methods, but the network costs are rarely considered and only become evident when in production use. The rapid decline in cost to produce and transport high quality video has enabled it to move quickly beyond an entertainment vehicle to a core business communications medium. As desktop video conferencing becomes more prevalent, Skype takes root in the enterprise, and both video use and mobile communications offloading increases, network planners should expect the share of network video traffic to continue expanding. This trend parallels public Internet usage where video traffic exceeded non-video data traffic in Without careful planning, this expansion could have a crippling effect on application performance and significantly impact productivity. It is a profound change in user behavior with direct impact on enterprise infrastructure. Organizations must understand the bandwidth impact of video now and in the future to prevent it from consuming network resources and starving critical business applications. Converged Networks and the Impact of HD As if video traffic from more traditional sources wasn t enough, converged networks that integrate IPTV and CCTV systems with corporate data systems are becoming common. The convergence of IP-based video systems saves organizations capital and operational costs by leveraging a common infrastructure, but the benefits come at the price of significantly greater bandwidth demands. The problem is exacerbated by the prominence of high definition video in both IPTV and CCTV systems. For CCTV, increasing numbers of organizations are procuring cameras with enhanced picture quality and resolution. High-definition and 10+ megapixel cameras now the norm not the 2

3 exception require significantly more bandwidth than traditional cameras, just as high definition video requires significantly more than standard definition. The increase in bandwidth consumed as video resolution increases is evident in the chart below showing video bandwidth consumption at different resolutions with common encoding algorithms. To put the amount of bandwidth consumed in perspective, take a minute to consider a typical voice-over-ip (VoIP) call. A VoIP session typically consumes approximately 30kbps using industrystandard compression. Low quality video typically consumes about 5 to 10 times that amount. High Definition video will consume anywhere from 15 to 1,000 times that of a VoIP session depending on a number of factors including resolution, video content and the type of encoding employed. Network capacity consumption is amplified further when a video stream is accessed simultaneously by multiple users whether it s employees viewing training materials, security personnel monitoring CCTV systems or customers viewing IPTV screens. The potential exists for an unpredictable avalanche of video traffic to clog the arteries of your network and bring critical business applications offline. In fact, there are few organizations who haven t experienced this first hand or taken proactive steps to throttle networks to restrict video consumption altogether. Given this staggering potential for network resource consumption and the corresponding potential for the disruption of critical business operations, it is clear that network planners need to take action to proactively manage data traversing their network. But what action should be taken? Network QoS: the key to an Optimized Network If you want to see an immediate improvement in application performance, smoother voice and video service and increased user satisfaction, the first place to look is QoS. But what exactly is QoS? Quality of Service (QoS) is a set of control mechanisms that, when implemented properly, provide guaranteed application service levels by managing the delay, delay variation (jitter), bandwidth, and packet loss on the network. Guaranteed network service levels provide opportunity for applications to run at peak performance. How does this translate into day-to-day user experience? It determines whether applications are fast or slow to load, respond and update. It can often determine whether real-time video can be accessed at all, and it can even determine whether a transaction happens or whether a page times out. It has a profound impact on business process efficiency. Today s typical enterprise networks have QoS control mechanisms, such as the capability to identify and classify business critical traffic and prioritize flows, but few IT practitioners implement anything beyond the default QoS settings. After all, identifying and classifying business critical traffic is a difficult and time-consuming task that is often superseded by day-to-day challenges. This leads many organizations to take the easier yet more expensive route of purchasing more and more bandwidth to ensure performance. Your organization can avoid falling into this trap. Implementing a proactive QoS strategy is a realistic and achievable method of quickly providing value to the business and increasing IT 3

4 return on investment. Most implementations require little to no capital investment and can be operational within a few months. To achieve success, network planners must understand evolving network requirements, changing user practices, the QoS tools available, and the key engineering and operational processes. Network Optimization: The Steps To Achieve Performance Network Optimization can be performed using QoS control mechanisms to increase the performance of the enterprise network and boost productivity and user satisfaction. Following these steps you will maximize your return on your network investment. In our experience there are four key QoS steps: Network Traffic Analysis and Planning (NTAP) The first step toward implementing QoS consists of analyzing application network traffic requirements. The analysis should include a forecast for existing applications and also a plan for new applications and usage patterns. The analysis should include bandwidth, latency and jitter requirements. The clear challenge is that few applications provide detailed bandwidth, latency and jitter requirements so field work is required. Network planners should measure actual throughput from operational networks and applications and forecast others as they arise. Using expected user growth as an input, this empirical data can be used to extrapolate future bandwidth needs. Developing a QoS Model design, test, plan for implementation Based on data obtained in the NTAP, a specific QoS plan should be developed. Each application should be mapped to a specific marking, leveraging industry standard templates to define the traffic types. During the development phase, the proposed QoS plan should be implemented within a test environment. The test environment should mimic real-world characteristics to the extent practical and a test plan should be developed that includes expected results. Testers should utilize traffic generators to produce packets that mimic expected traffic, giving a near-real-world environment that maximizes the likelihood of a successful implementation. Once testing is complete, an implementation plan should be created. The implementation plan should include not only step-by-step QoS configurations for each device in the enterprise network, but also any pre-maintenance activities, back-out plans in case something goes wrong, and postimplementation testing procedures and expected results. Implementing Enterprise QoS With proper planning, implementation of QoS can be straightforward. Although QoS implementation should not impact network availability or performance, implementations should occur within planned maintenance windows. The configurations can typically be pushed from a centralized network operations center. Any anomalies from the implementation plan should be carefully documented and analyzed to ensure the implementation was successful and results fall in the predicted range. Monitoring Network and Application Performance Network planners should include application and network QoS monitoring systems in their design. These systems monitor link bandwidth, in addition to monitoring the overall performance of each node. The servers, storage systems and applications should also be monitored and the data correlated to ensure comprehensive application performance. Without monitoring, IT organizations are flying blind and relying on their help desks as their early warning system. This, of course, is an unreliable mechanism and has a delayed response, putting IT in a reactive mode with unhappy users clamoring for change. The monitoring systems enable tweaking of the QoS model and settings based on actual performance and changing usage patterns. It can be the foundation of a true early warning system that enables the IT organization to identify real-time issues prior to the flood of help desk calls as well as update forecasts and identify changing usage patterns. Modern network monitoring 4

5 systems also include traffic generators and collectors, dispersed throughout the enterprise network, that sample actual application traffic. Measurements can be collected and analyzed to ensure proper bandwidth, latency and jitter in real-time. These measurements ensure servicelevel agreements are being met between network operators and users. All of this activity can be focused on ensuring that critical applications have consistent and reliable data traffic and incidents of network performance issues don t materially impact business operations. Start Your Network Optimization and QoS Adoption Today There is no doubt that the demands placed upon enterprise networks continue to grow. Businessto-business and business-to-consumer applications must be highly available and performance is critical. Real-time applications, such as voice and video, require proper bandwidth and low latency and jitter. Continuing to upgrade wide-area networks and network backbones may be necessary, but is rarely sufficient in ensuring consistent and reliable network performance. Lack of QoS adoption also fails to maximize the return on investment in your existing network infrastructure. To ensure the availability of business critical applications without wasting capital on an overdesigned network you should optimize your network without delay. A QoS-enabled enterprise network provides assurance to organizations that their applications are being delivered in the most effective means possible, with priorities given to business-critical applications. There are a number of best practices that IT organizations can adopt to get in front of the data deluge caused by video and bandwidth intensive business applications. Harris IT Services Atlantic Boulevard, Suite 300 Dulles, VA , USA harris.com Harris is a registered trademark of Harris Corporation. Trademarks and tradenames are the property of their respective companies Harris Corporation 3/ SEC d0513