opinion piece
Consolidation Drives Network
Performance 6 Feet Under
opinion piece | Consolidation Drives Network Performance 6 Feet Under
Contents
Consolidation drives network performance 6 feet under 01
Centralisation, consolidation and virtualisation ... is there a universal
key to ensure these initiatives deliver the promised results? 01
Is the hype justified? 01
Pitfall 1: Poorly performing branch office networks Pitfall 2: Poorly performing workers Leapfrog over mistakes and straight to success with this winning strategy Branch office network considerations: Your critical checklist The network security requirements of the branch The types and number of applications that the branch will need to access
Whether the branch will use a “direct to the Net” strategy
Whether the branch network will carry voice traffic
How IT services such as file, print, DNS, and DHCP will be delivered locally
Performance optimisation technology: Failing to prepare is preparing to fail
Branch office consolidation: The winning approach 03
opinion piece | Consolidation Drives Network Performance 6 Feet Under
Consolidation drives network
performance 6 feet under
Ever wished you had an early
warning system about some of the
technology mistakes you’ve made
in the past? That you could have
avoided some of the expensive
errors you’ve made, or done things
in a way that would have changed
the outcome and effect of your
technology decisions? Sometimes
the dividing line between success
and failure is no more than a
moment’s informed analysis or a
word of advice from someone who’s
been down the same road and
learnt some hard lessons firsthand.
In this article, we aim to give you
just that... an insider’s view based
on market feedback and firsthand
experience out in the field that can
make all the difference between
a technology solution that works
for your business – and one that
doesn’t. If you’re looking at branch
office consolidation as a technology
option, read on to discover how a
small but incredibly important piece
of advice can save you from an
expensive technology mistake.
Centralisation, consolidation
and virtualisation... is there
a universal key to ensure
these initiatives deliver the
promised results?
Through many client engagements across
the world, we’ve often remarked on how
IT departments in modern organisations
walk a fine line in balancing operations,
strategy and focus. They need to support
the agile and aggressive nature of the
business and deliver applications to a
highly mobile workforce and, at the
same time, save costs to deliver more
to the bottom line. Add to this the
legal requirement that they work within
stringent regulatory frameworks to ensure
business compliance, and the complexities
of making the right strategic decisions for
the IT department (and through this, for
the business itself) become overwhelming.
These are the operational realities IT
departments face every day of each
successive financial year, and we are
always looking for answers to the
questions of how to do things in newer,
better, and more cost-effective ways.
The question is what part do centralisation,
consolidation and virtualisation play in
answering this puzzle?
Over and above the savings in
infrastructure and operational costs,
branch office infrastructure
consolidation can also reduce carbon
emissions – a growing and, increasingly
important commercial, concern in IT.
Is the hype justified?
You may have heard a lot of hype and
fanfare about – or been caught up in – the
huge surge of interest in centralisation,
consolidation and virtualisation. It seems
as if every trade journal, tech observer and
industry consultant is talking about these
initiatives and exploring the benefits and
results they can deliver. But how much
is hype, what are the gurus not telling
us, and how easy is this technology to
implement? Is it really the universal
‘band aid’ that some proponents are
punting it as? Taking an objective stance,
you can see that reducing costs and
achieving compliance are two strong
drivers behind the trend – compelling
drivers because these are pain-points that
are felt uniformly across all business and
market segments. The premise is that
fewer data centres, fewer servers and
fewer storage devices mean less hardware
and so lower support and maintenance
costs. It’s an immensely attractive business
case, and to make it even more compelling,
virtualisation technologies allow companies
to provide more resilience on their data
centre hardware, application servers,
wide area network (WAN) devices and
increasingly also on their data centre
network environment. So far, so good ...
and in the next logical step, this approach
is being extended to cover branch office
IT infrastructure consolidation.
This is where we hit the first real
cautionary sign in the stampede towards
consolidation. Stop and ask yourself, what
impact might this use of consolidation
and virtualisation have on my business?
Across the board, organisations are
reducing the number of servers and
network devices deployed in their
remote branches to reduce the cost of
opening and establishing new branches,
and minimise support and ongoing
maintenance costs of branch infrastructure.
Some organisations have seen up to an
85% reduction in their branch office
IT footprint. Over and above the savings
in infrastructure and operational costs,
branch office infrastructure consolidation
can also reduce carbon emissions – a
growing and, increasingly important
commercial, concern in IT.
It all sounds good, but look slightly below
the surface and there are cautionary signs
that not everyone is detecting. A primary
source of the problems experienced with
01
opinion piece | Consolidation Drives Network Performance 6 Feet Under
consolidation projects is a failure
to understand how the underlying
network architecture is affected by
additional loads that it was not designed
to bear. When branch offices are
consolidated, network traffic patterns
change dramatically. A higher proportion
of users may now access corporate
applications from remote sites and branch
offices than that connect directly from the
location where the applications reside.
In addition, employees are more mobile
than ever and they’re more tech savvy.
Employees are pushing the envelope today
and now expect corporate IT teams to
support the same applications that they
use at home, such as Skype and Instant
Messenger. They’re demanding rich
functionality and more flexible access,
also resulting in a significant impact on
network traffic patterns. These early
warning signs are cause for concern.
Smarter IT departments are taking note
of these, looking for ways to overcome
them, and so safeguarding their
investment in the network.
Pitfall 1: Poorly performing
branch office networks
One of the unwanted symptoms of
consolidating branch infrastructure is that
the performance of application delivery is
significantly reduced. Applications that run
effectively over local area networks (LANs)
often do not run well over WAN links and
tend to be very slow. In addition to the
longer distances that application traffic is
now expected to run, are the significant
changes to the type of traffic that users
get delivered to their laptops, desktops
and mobile devices. These receive a mix
of data, voice and video traffic, and a
much higher percentage of web traffic as
we see a move to web applications and
outsourced software as a service (SaaS)
IT application models.
Pitfall 2: Poorly
performing workers
Users who have a poor experience when
trying to access applications to do their
job functions are unproductive and have
high levels of frustration. The result?
De-motivated employees, lost business
and high costs, all of which will hit the
business where it hurts the most – on the
bottom-line.
Leapfrog over mistakes and
straight to success with this
winning strategy
The secret to a successful consolidation
exercise is simple and obvious ... and yet
so often overlooked. By simply using
network performance optimisation
technologies as part of the branch office
consolidation project, you can unlock
the full potential and benefits of this
strategy and ensure it works effectively
in your organisation. You may think
that optimisation technologies are an
unnecessary expense, or over-complicate
what is already a major new change ... but
experience proves time and time again that
it’s an extremely smart spend of budget.
Branch office network
considerations: Your
critical checklist
There are a number of things to consider
when approaching a branch office
consolidation project. Some of the
important things you should cross off your
check list when implementing include:
he network security requirements of
T
the branch:
The
branch will be as vulnerable to attack
as the head office and security measures
need to be implemented to ensure the
confidentiality, integrity and availability of
branch data. Firewalling services, content
security and filtering, intrusion prevention
and VPN encryption services are important
sets of functionality to have at each branch.
he types and number of applications
T
that the branch will need to access:
T he typical branch will access many
different kinds of applications including
web applications that may or may not be
outsourced, ERP and CRM applications,
file and print services for normal day to
day work, and potentially a host of other
applications that are required to run the
business. It’s important to understand which
applications are business-critical – this
knowledge will form the basis of the branch
office traffic policy that your performance
optimisation technology will enforce.
hether the branch will use a “direct
W
to the Net” strategy:
Internet traffic on all networks is growing
rapidly as the Internet becomes more
and more important as a business tool.
Sometimes an organisation will have a
central Internet connectivity strategy where
the only connection to the Internet is from
the head office, and all branch Internet
traffic needs to flow over the corporate
WAN before breaking out to the Internet.
Another strategy is to have a “direct to the
Net” strategy where each branch will have
its own connection and Internet traffic
would not need to traverse the WAN. You
need to decide upfront which of these
strategies to follow.
hether the branch network will carry
W
voice traffic:
Voice traffic is more sensitive to network
latency, delay and jitter than data traffic. It
needs to be managed differently to ensure
that the voice quality is maintained. VoIP
at the branch offers significant cost savings
and productivity improvements, but the
performance characteristics of the voice
traffic need to be carefully considered at
the design stage.
ow IT services such as file, print, DNS,
H
and DHCP will be delivered locally:
ranch office users will need access to
B
basic IT services such as DNS, DHCP,
file and print services to allow day to
day working to continue as usual. File
services in particular become an important
consideration when files that are accessed
from branch offices are housed at a central
location. File services are particularly
“chatty” and running them over a WAN
has a hugely negative performance impact,
which needs to be mitigated.
Performance optimisation
technology: Failing to prepare
is preparing to fail
This is the exact stage where so many wellintended IT initiatives fall down and fail.
Preparation is the secret to any successful
consolidation or virtualisation project. It’s
not primarily about the hot new technology
and all the benefits it promises – but about
business, and how that cool new stuff will
fit in with and advance the working of your
current operations. The business case for
consolidating branch office infrastructure
02
opinion piece | Consolidation Drives Network Performance 6 Feet Under
is compelling, but how do you embark on
a project like this without sacrificing the
performance of the branch network?
The basis for branch network performance
improvements is in the use of performance
optimisation technology. These technologies
allow the branch network to appear as
though it is connected directly to the central
data centre, even though it may be on the
other end of a WAN link.
These technologies are able to achieve
these fantastic performance improvements
through a variety of functions, such
as managing bandwidth, compressing
data, caching content and optimising
protocols. Depending on the applications
and network architecture, performance
improvements of over 100 times (and
more in some cases) are possible. In
addition, organisations have seen up to
a 50% reduction in bandwidth usage,
simply by optimising the traffic that flows
between the branch office and the central
data centre. This also means you can
reduce your bandwidth costs by delaying
bandwidth upgrades.
There are many different options available
to organisations wanting to benefit from
consolidating their branch infrastructures,
from stand-alone WAN Optimisation
Controllers (WOCs) and Application
Delivery Controllers (ADCs), to integrated
performance-enhancing features within
standard network equipment and
combinations of security and optimisation
appliances. Once the performance
requirements are understood and the
branch strategy defined, it becomes
easier to pinpoint the technology that
fulfils your needs.
Organisations
have seen up to a
50% reduction in
bandwidth usage,
simply by optimising
the traffic that flows
between the branch
office and the central
data centre.
CS / DDCC-0753 / 05/11 © Copyright Dimension Data 2011
Branch office consolidation:
The winning approach
Don’t make the same expensive blunders
others are making in the headlong dash
towards consolidation. It’s important
to have a structured approach when
considering consolidating branch office
infrastructure and a good understanding
of your present architecture, and the best
ways to optimise the new traffic flows
you’ll be introducing.
First, it is important to understand the
network traffic that is currently flowing
over the links. You cannot manage what
you don’t know and gathering statistics,
for example which applications are
using the bandwidth, what the network
efficiency is and what the latency of the
links are, is an important first step.
Second, once you have a good
understanding of your critical business
applications, the link needs to be
structured to reserve bandwidth for these
important applications. The less important
applications will then get less priority to
ensure that they don’t crowd out the
important application traffic.
Third, the magic of performance
optimisation technologies can be
employed to accelerate the data flowing
over the network. This is the step that
will demonstrate the true value of these
technologies and allow branch office
consolidation to take place without any
performance degradation.
of people are going to make the same
basic but expensive mistake in deploying
these technologies and end up with
underperforming networks, frustrated
users and an unacceptably low return on
their investment. The gap between the
promise and potential of these initiatives,
and what they deliver, will be unacceptably
wide for those people. Avoid becoming
a consolidation statistic by thinking
strategically and considering network
performance from the outset – it cannot
be ignored. Incorporating our five point
action plan into your consolidation
roadmap may make all the difference
between implementing a winning solution,
and spending a lot of money for an
inadequate return.
Avoid becoming
a consolidation
statistic by thinking
strategically and
considering network
performance from
the outset – it
cannot be ignored.
Fourth, the solution needs to be managed.
Once the technology has been fully
deployed it is important to continue to
review the performance reports and to
continue making improvements to the
traffic policies to get the maximum benefit
from the investment and to accommodate
any infrastructure changes or new
applications that are rolled out.
Last, it’s valuable to look for other areas
within the network that would benefit
from having performance optimisation
technologies deployed, and scale the
solution to providing performance
enhancements over a wider area.
The migration to consolidated and
virtualised branch office infrastructure
is a trend that’s here to stay. But lots
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