Accelerating Business Applications

 

If you want to improve end-user productivity by reducing the response time of business applications…

You need Ipanema!


Your network is at the heart of the delivery chain of many business critical applications. You have deployed optimization or QoS so that each user gets his-or-her share of the WAN resources.


However, some users located in long distance sites are not happy with the response time they get. More generally, the users of bandwidth-hungry application are not satisfied with what they obtain from the WAN. The WAN delay and bandwidth capacity imposes limitations; still it cannot be changed much.


Many vendors are proposing you point acceleration solutions to deal with the performance concerns of some of your applications or sites. Will you deploy those devices like many patches on users’ wounds? Such an approach will rapidly be very difficult to manage and reconcile with global management of the performance of your critical applications over the WAN.


You should first reassess your optimization and QoS parameters. In fact, without a proper allocation of WAN resources, applications will perform badly. Congestions are creating both a lack of bandwidth and extra router delay that contribute to degrading the performance of applications. You cannot count solely on compression to deal with the lack of bandwidth. Compression creates virtual “free” bandwidth, but the amount of bandwidth created varies over time depending on the amount of redundancy in the flows.

In no way is compression a substitute for advanced QoS mechanisms.

Furthermore, deploying acceleration without having implemented proper optimization can be dangerous for application performance. Acceleration solutions without advanced QoS capabilities are known to worsen congestions when they occur, especially in MPLS networks with meshed topologies.

Having verified your QoS implementation, you should then be aware that there are only 3 key bottlenecks that can cause application performance degradations:

 

  • The TCP bottleneck: because of its design, TCP is often not able to make use of all available network resources.

 

  • The bandwidth bottleneck: the performance of many (but not all) applications is related to the available bandwidth. If it is higher, then the response time of the application will be lower.

 

  • The application protocol bottleneck: some applications are not designed for the WAN: their application protocol is relying on a too high ratio of protocol exchanges over transmitted data. When the network delay is increasing, their performance degrades a lot.

 

It should be pointed out that not all of those bottlenecks are of equal in terms of their lifetime. All application protocol bottlenecks with no exception can be removed simply by updating the design of the application to take into account WAN-style network delays. This is what Microsoft has been doing for many years. Exchange 2003 combined with Outlook 2003 cache mode is for example exhibiting vast performance improvements over its predecessors when used over the WAN. CIFS, a protocol known for it very bad WAN performance, has been completely redesigned to solve WAN performance issues as part of the Windows Vista and Longhorn operating system releases.


If possible, upgrading the application to benefit from the highest level of WAN compatibility shall always be part of application response time reduction initiatives.


In any case, Ipanema is addressing those 3 key application performance bottlenecks through its integrated acceleration features.


Ipanema acceleration alleviates the WAN performance bottleneck of many applications, including Windows file sharing (CIFS), email (including MS Exchange 2003 and Lotus Notes), ERP/CRM applications such as Siebel, SAP or Oracle, database applications and any Web-based applications and more generally any bandwidth-hungry applications including in-house applications and applications based on large file transfers such as CAD applications.


Thanks to the Ipanema Solution, the response time of business applications will be minimized while still guaranteeing that the appropriate WAN resources are delivered to each user of critical applications whenever they are accessing the application from domestic or international locations.

 

 

 

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