QoS & Control

Guarantee user experience across your global network

Ipanema's ANS™ combines QoS & Control with Application Visibility, WAN Optimization and Dynamic WAN Selection in a single, tightly coupled, coherent system that delivers truly optimal results - meaning the best application performance at the lowest cost. Ipanema's approach to QoS & Control guarantees superior user experience and business application acceleration. With ANS, you can:

• Drive performance over the global WAN from a simple set of Application Performance Objectives (APOs)
• Protect real-time and interactive flows and converge all applications on a single network
• Manage globally meshed flows from central sites.
   

Drive performance over the global WAN from Application Performance Objectives

APOs set per-user minimum quality expectations for each important application in the enterprise. The APOs are defined from the central management software (SALSA®) which then communicates them to the distributed devices (ip|engine®).

The ip|engines cooperate with each other in a fully distributed manner in order to enforce the global performance objectives. Enterprises need only to define which applications matter most by their relative criticalities to the business. A higher criticality is set for more important applications where the business needs guaranteed performance. A low criticality does not mean that the application does not matter; only that when demand for resources is high the business can tolerate having users of the lower criticality application receive fewer resources.

Applications are defined using Layer 3 to 7 criteria. For example, Citrix and HTTP applications can be defined based on published application names and URLs, respectively. Then a service level is configured for each application. It defines what performance the “optimized network” should deliver for each active user.

Once the APOs are defined, ANS assesses whether or not they are currently being delivered over the network. In the example below, site D has serious application performance problems, including poor performance of high criticality applications such as SAP. When Ipanema QoS & Control is activated, the system automatically allocates the available resources to match or even exceed the global objectives. Critical applications at site D then receive the required network resources, resulting in these users being 100% satisfied across the entire network.

APOs can also be used for security reasons or traffic denial. For example, an objective set to 0 Kbits/s will shut that application down, network-wide.

Protect real-time and interactive flows and converge all application on a single network

Ipanema’s ANS manages all characteristics of networking, such as delay, loss and jitter. Application flows are handled differently depending on their technical requirements and individual user behavior. For example:

• Packets belonging to real-time flows such as VoIP or telepresence are forwarded in a manner that prevents unwanted delay, loss or jitter.
• Packets belonging to interactive flows such as Citrix, VMware View or Windows RDP typically require low transit delay. They are analyzed to detect user behavior in real-time and manage changing flows, such as where users load or save a local file inside a Citrix session. ANS is then able to prevent the data-transfer phases of the interactive flow from freezing other users' interactive Citrix sessions.
• Packets belonging to data-transfer flows, such as FTP or email, are forwarded so that they receive the maximum possible bandwidth resources without degrading delay-sensitive flows.

Manage meshed flows globally from central sites

In a modern branch office, users need to access applications that sit in multiple locations including server sites, private data center, hosted servers or applications and public cloud over the Internet. The branch office is rapidly congested by the combination of all these flows competing for the access bandwidth in upstream and downstream, severely affecting user experience.

Ipanema’s ANS solves this situation (and many that are much more complex) by having a physical ip|engine device in the path of each traffic source, including data centers, and using telemanagement for the branch.

The permanent collaboration among ANS autonomic agents allows emulating a local device (called tele|engine) to gain full understanding of the global situation at the remote branch: i.e., the combination of each user’s application flows and the  traffic matrix. ANS autonomic agents::

•  “See” the upstream and downstream traffic for the branch in real time to analyze the global competition between flows;
• Collectively emulate a local device (called tele|engine), which automatically adjusts each of the branch flows to guarantee the performance of business-critical applications for users;
• Temporarily throttle back less-critical traffic, if required, to protect business flows while ensuring the maximum usage of the available bandwidth.
   

Global visibility through tele|engines for unequipped branch offices is obtained by ANS autonomic agents collecting traffic, information about each flow (application, volume, quality, etc.) and automatically consolidating the information at the ANS central management level (SALSA).

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