Datacenter Consolidation


If you are planning a datacenter consolidation… You need Ipanema!

Your company has decided to simplify the management of key business applications through the consolidation of distributed servers. Server consolidation brings a lot of benefits, including a dramatic reduction of management costs. However, consolidating servers means that end-users who are accessing applications today from the LAN will access them tomorrow from the WAN. They will face more of less severe performance degradations caused by the higher network delay and decreased bandwidth. In addition, this will create extra WAN flows that will need to coexist peacefully with the existing traffic.


In such a situation it is always possible to make use of Citrix Presentation Server technology or Windows Remote Desktop to virtualize the clients in the datacenter and minimize their distance with the servers. Such a solution hides the application flows inside WAN-compatible terminal sessions, removing the need to address their intrinsic potential performance bottlenecks. It however, does not remove the need to manage the performance of the flows.
 

Ipanema's ability to classify the flows up to layer 7, including attributes such as Citrix-published applications and HTTP URLs is fundamental to make sure that the flows will be handled according to their importance to the business. The Ipanema Solution's ability to guarantee the performance of critical flows under all circumstances will then ensure that the consolidation is running smoothly.


In the case of a consolidation using the native application clients, you should be aware of the 3 key bottlenecks that can cause application performance degradations:

 

  • The TCP bottleneck: because of its design, TCP is 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 and 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. A datacenter consolidation initiative is therefore a good time to think about upgrading the application to benefit from the highest level of WAN compatibility.


In any case, Ipanema is addressing those 3 key application performance bottlenecks through its integrated acceleration features and mitigate the lower bandwidth and higher latency of the WAN compared to the LAN.


Whatever your choice will be, the Ipanema Solution will also allow you to understand the impact of the consolidation process into the WAN resource requirements through its Rightsizing function.


With Ipanema, the fundamental and compelling IT transformation that datacenter consolidation represents can be achieved with the certainty that the WAN will not be a problem. 

 

 

 

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