WAN Management/Optimisation

Bakedgoods

Bakedgoods

Bakedgoods

Capodecina
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I know a few of you are very knowledgeable in the networking department so seems logical to ask...

What would you recommend for WAN Management and traffic sharping/prioritisation?

Currenly using Packeteer? Although a produce by Expand has been mentioned.

Looking to improve the WAN without having to plough loads of money into the connection itself.
 
As I understand it, the Juniper kit you've mentioned is more for compressing data to effectively allowing more throughput?

We already have Packeteer implemented so it's unlike it will be removed and left just to a Cisco router. I was just trying to establish if anything out there basically does it better?

Just to try further my understanding, could you answer a couple of questions?

If we want to prioritise traffic for certain web applications and business critical systems and split it something like this....

Biz Systems - 45%
Biz Web Apps - 45%
Recreational - 10%

Will it only enforce that under times of heavy load when it's required, or will it take place all the time? When it hits dinner time the number of users browsing the internet (recreational or business related) will increase dramatically, will it still only allow 10% or is it dynamic in that it will allow up to 100% to be used IF the other two priorities were at 0%?

Thanks for any input guys :)
 
bigredshark said:
Yes, the Juniper kit is optimisation with soem compression technology included. What your describing is very basic prioritisation really. I would seriously do it on a router or a firewall rather than buying additional equipment.

Regarding your question on dynamic priorities, thats possible on pretty much anything, I'd do it by setting guarenteed bandwidth and CoS together rather than creating rigidly defined pipes for each type of traffic.
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, how exactly do you set CoS and gaurenteed bandwidth together? I thought they are pretty dissimilar things? If we set CoS for http traffic it would group the Biz Web Apps and Recreational Browsing together. Can you setup gaurenteed bandwidth to function with that so it will still distin guish between a Biz Web App (also http traffic)?

I'm guessing the answer is yes, but as i'm still learning it just seems a little contradictory.

I'm just doing research at the moment, bare in mind my knowledge isn't vast and I have minimal experience, so take it easy :D
 
jimjamuk said:
any reason why you want somthing other than that Packeteer? Work in a number of data centres and many are using them
Click to expand...

It's mainly just research into if there's any way we can improve or reduce costs.

Good posts V-Spec.

One thing to clear up though, Biz Web Apps aren't people, I mean business web applications.

For example, we have access to a corporate web portal that is remote. This would still be http traffic. When lunch time comes round and all the users jump on BBC News or whatever, access to the corporate web portal can really slow down...

The http traffic will originate from the same source address, so there needs to be a different method to distinguish the data.
 
V-Spec said:
lol! sorry its friday morning :D

In which case its difficult to classify traffic as its basically all exactly the same, the only difference is its ultimate destination, for example the corporate web portal, or google/porn/etc?

The best way would be to define a queueing policy where you specify the destination address(es) of the corporate web portal, and reserve a specific amount of bandwidth for traffic traveling to it from any source address on the LAN,

For example, on a Cisco box the config would look something like:

set access-lists to match traffic going to the corporate web portal, (1.1.1.1 is the web portal in my example)

Outbound
access-list 109 permit ip 172.16.0.0 0.0.255.255 host 1.1.1.1


class-map match-all outboundportal
match access-group 109
!
policy-map outbound
class outboundportal
bandwidth percent 30
!
Interface serial 0
description Wan interface
ip address 1.2.3.4 255.255.255.252
service-policy output outbound


This basically allocates 30% of the link bandwidth to traffic travelling towards the portal based on the speed of the WAN interface.
You can't queue traffic coming inbound to the router from the webportal (only police) you can queue outbound toward the LAN but it won't help because the WAN interface will become congested before the LAN qos policy can drop the packets, to have inbound queueing the upstream router (ISP) would need to queue outbound towards you, or you'd need to use hard policing..
This would be the main issue, I assume that most of the congestion would be caused by people downloading normal webpages/stuff from the internet and not upstream bandwidth.
If the ISP cannot do any form of Qos for your connection back, you could make an opposite qos policy and change the bandwidth of the LAN interface to fool the qos into thinking that its the same speed as the WAN interface, this would allow qos to drop normal web packets outbound towards the LAN, this would cause TCP to throttle back and control the rate somewhat..

Trial and error most likley!
Click to expand...


Thanks, that makes sense :)

But like I said before, you've used 30% bandwidth as a limit there, i'm guessing that only comes into effect when it needs to if you will, not constantly?

Regarding Packeteer, I think we may be fine with that then and it was seem like a pretty pointless cost to worry about implementing something else.

What about the Juniper acceleration kit though? How much of a benefit do you actually get from the in terms of throughput etc?
 
In some senses that is quite applicable.

When you say a certain type of traffic, what do you mean? I asked my college tutor about WAN acceleration today and he said the same thing, it depends on the type of traffic.

It will mainly be data generated by business systems.

Is there any software/hardware which would be more beneficial than an implementation of this?

http://www.packeteer.com/products/packetshaper/
 
Last edited:
Wardie said:
Is there any software/hardware which would be more beneficial than an implementation of this?

http://www.packeteer.com/products/packetshaper/
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply, what do you reckon about the last bit of my post that I quoted above?

From where i'm sitting a the moment, it seems like any changes regarding different hardware or technology for wan optimisation or acceleration aren't really going to offer much of a tangible benefit, and perhaps how these implementations have been configured should be reviewed.

Ultimately it might come down to having to upgrade the WAN link itself...

***Eeeeee you ninja edited***
 
There's still the problem of affordability if you don't live in or near a city though?

We don't have the greatest connections around this way :(
 
Well, we aren't right out in the sticks but the connectivity isn't great.

Don't you work for an ISP? I'd be interested to see the cost of upgrading our line, but i'm fairly certain it'll cost an arm and a leg. (Location = Barrow-In-Furness).

I've seen a few positive comments made about Riverbed solutions.

Packeteer seems to offer optimisation and acceleration. The more reading I do regarding this and from general life experience, all-in-ones never offer as good of a product as specifically designed ones, they are just more affordable.

Thanks for the replies it's aprpeciated :)
 
Ahh no problem.

Juniper does generally seem to do things better than most. I may be wrong and i'll do so digging, but I can't see any WAN acceleration/optimisation hardware or software other than what we have implemented really offering that much more. I suppose there comes a point when you simply HAVE to upgrade your WAN link.

All of the technology we've been discussing deals with data as the final stage (the wan out link), is there nothing which helps increase LAN/WAN performance by compressing data better at the source (the user device)?

Sorry for all the questions, i'm a curious one and i'm just getting started with networking :)
 
rick827 said:
We use riverbed for remote workers on laptop/3g datacards and a few remote sites stuck on ISDN. Works well, but I wouldn't use it throughout the network
Click to expand...

I've just been looking at that, the Mobile product stuff they offer?

How have you found it? We have had issues with slowness when working remotely and this could be quite beneficial.

Did it offer a noticeable performance increase for mobile users?
 
Any comparisons of systems compared to packeteer?

Riverbed mobile looks like it could be quite promising as remote working can be slow..
 
Just to bump this, does anyone thing the cost difference between Riverbed and Packeteer can be really justified? Especially if you were going to move from Packeteer to Riverbed or Juniper?

Also, have any of you got any idea how these fair with VoIP thrown into the mix?
 
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