Wide Area Network Bandwidth

As companies are spreading internationally and applications are increasingly becoming Web based, WAN bandwidth is becoming a concern. Often, low-priority applications are mixed together with high priority and mission-critical applications over the WAN. Companies have implemented packet shaping technologies with limited success in the past. Albeit expensive, WAN data compression is a newer technology that is being considered or deployed.

No matter what ones does about improving the WAN bandwidth scenario, it is important to monitor the trends and oddities in the bandwidth usage of the WAN. Often, it is important to slice-and-dice the WAN bandwidth usage by department, business units, applications, application categories, protocols, subnets, etc. to plan capacity increase or reallocation and even to prevent very low priority usages of WAN such as sharing an entertainment movie file with a colleague or downloading stuff from the Internet. nLive provides ways to:

• Search and drill down into WAN usage at various times of the day by host, business group, application, etc.
• Find abnormal usages in the form of 'problems' which gets notified
• Locate poor routing of data or poor placement of servers and backup
• Visualize the Bandwidth usage on traffic-graph
• Sort through bandwidth usage data on traffic tables
• Locate top users by charts
• (and more...)

Bandwidth Compression

Companies are considering WAN data compression in order to make use of limited bandwidth to run critical applications. However, there are two important aspects of WAN bandwidth and usage monitoring:

• Prior to implementing compression, study and understand who or what is using the bandwidth and whether that data is compressible or not. That is, whether the data contains repeatable chunks.
• After implementing compression, observe how it is performing, and what new applications are starting to use the freed up bandwidth.

nLive provides ways to:

• Allow you to look at the kind of traffic and helps you determine what is compressible and what is not
• Helps you optimize routing of data and applications to improve compression performance
• Search and drill down into WAN usage at various times of the day by host, business group, application, etc.
• Observe traffic in the compressed channels.