the network managers guide to application sla assurance

8/11/2019 The Network Managers Guide to Application SLA Assurance

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Whitepaper:

The Network Manager’sGuide to ApplicationSLA Assurance



The Network Manager’s Guide to Application SLA Assurance

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Executive SummaryWith the distributed, collaborative nature ofwork today, your workforce has never been more

dependent on applications and devices to beproductive. But that productivity is firmly predicatedon having a reliable predictable network that knitstogether people in any location and at any time. The challenge for network managers of assuringa consistently productive user experience iscompounding rapidly, as the demands of mobility,the cloud, video and real-time applications redefinethe IT landscape.

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 importantusers. In order to provide a convenient, productive work environment in 2013, network managersneed to be able to cut through the complexity and easily monitor, control and optimize thequality of the user experience and application service levels across all networks.

Network managers and administrators should read this whitepaper to learn about the keydrivers that demand a mindset shift from application delivery to application assurance for2013. Understand the scope of the challenge, learn how top organizations are finding successwith 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.

With multiple new technology forces on a collision course

in your network, your job is getting more complex. Servervirtualization 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.

Outgrowing Bandwidth

The sheer volume of data growth is outpacinginnovation 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.

FTPWeb

P2P

VideoContent

Collaboration

1995 2015




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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 email 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 onnetwork conditions and performance for meeting SLAs. A growing percentage of our applications are now cloud-

based or accessed from remote sites, which means you can’t treat application performance problems without

considering the network in 2013. 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?




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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 ofcloaked 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 oforganizations 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 ChallengeLet’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.

1 “The Changing Face of Network Performance,” Aberdeen Group, October 2012

2 “2012 WAN Optimization Spectrum Report” TRAC Research, October 2012

3 “Focus Your Network Strategy on User Experience, Not Application Delivery,” Forrester Research, February 2011




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UMass Dartmouth gains greater visibility and control over collaborative andrecreational 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 high-bandwidth 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.

The City of Richmond (Calif.) assures application access and gains control ofrecreational 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 email 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

“Without Exinda, we do not have a functioning network. It ’s what saves our bacon every day.”

— Rich Pacheco, Network Systems Manager, UMass Dartmouth




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Ice cream maker R&R Manufacturing assures a good experience when usingweb-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 branch-

office 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.

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 candefine key performance indicators for each in terms of application responsiveness and performance. For most

companies, you’ll have ERP, email, 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.

“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




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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 withyour 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. Email,

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.

Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN Optimization and Network Controlsolutions. Exinda enables organizations to assure a predictable user experiencefor strategic business applications through policy-based WAN Optimization andInternet Control that intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimizetraffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped morethan 2,500 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide assure applicationperformance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreationalapplications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive.

For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

About Exinda

WhitePaper_NetworkManagerGuideSLA_v_2_13_US

Copyright 2013, Exinda Networks Inc.

www.exinda.com

1.877.439.4632

the network managers guide to application sla assurance

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