Increasing online traffic can cause your business activities to
flounder. Will Garside considers tools that let you bypass
congestion. Also please remove the reference to the HTML version on
IT Network .
Many companies make the mistake of believing that a Web site and
an ISP agreement equals a fully-fledged e-business. Opening up the
doors to virtual trading, however, is likely to open a can of worms
in terms of fulfilling business transactions and meeting the raised
levels of customer service expectations.
This might explain the rash of products arriving on the market
that promise to "do a DHL" for data delivery - that is, guarantee
delivery of your Internet traffic to the right person at the right
time.
Analysts and users agree that the biggest problem curtailing
e-business is that the Internet is still slow and unreliable.
According to Gartner, even by 2005 fewer than 20% of
mission-critical Web applications will achieve 24x7 availability.
The demise of the first Boo.com is in part attributable to a clumsy
Web site, described as "painfully slow" by many users, that made no
provision for managing traffic loads.
Certainly, the market for Internet traffic management (ITM)
tools is growing rapidly according to analysts at IDC, who predict
a market worth $14bn (£9.8bn) by 2004. Tools that smooth out
traffic surges and allocate Web page requests to spare resources
range from content caching, to packet shaping and performance
measurement.
Any ISP worth its salt has already implemented these measures
and should already be investigating the latest ITM technologies
such as layer 7 switching. But ITM is no longer the sole domain of
ISPs and carriers. Getting Web data to end-users on time has become
an urgent concern for business users who wish to maintain good
relationships with customers and suppliers.
Russell Hookway is a network adminstrator who has gone down this
route. As network manager for the Royal Borough of Kensington and
Chelsea, he is responsible for providing infrastructure to support
the council's intranet and Web sites and ensure connectivity in
schools and libraries within the borough.
Prompted by the "joined-up-government" initiative, which
requires public sector workers to conduct a large portion of their
daily tasks via the Internet or e-mail, Hookway decided to explore
traffic management options. A more urgent catalyst was the everyday
headache of assigning bandwidth to the various applications and
departments. "It was possible with our existing hardware but it is
complex and time consuming," he explained.
The council deployed Packeteer's Packetshaper in conjunction
with existing Nortel switches and Hewlett-Packard's Openview
software. "The technology allows me to simply allocate resources
between Web traffic, applications and the various sites we
support," said Hookway. "It seems to have worked very well so
far".
Among the emerging ITM solutions is the Internet Global
Positioning System (I-GPS). The system uses a configuration of
smart boxes called constellations at the ISP end. These link to
smaller probes at the content provider's host facilities around the
world. Each constellation is aware of the status of each probe and
automatically routes data to the server best able to deal with a
user request. This system of constellations and probes, if deployed
in depth, can provide a method of establishing Internet "weather"
conditions.
Raj Sharma, CEO and founder of HydraWeb, explained the potential
role of the technology. "A user sending a request to the Web site
may have a single Web address, such as stockprices.com, but actually has servers in a
dozen locations around the world.
"When the request reaches the Web site, the I-GPS system
analyses the request and the current weather conditions on the
Internet, before sending the request to the most appropriate
server. If one of stockprices.com's servers should fail, again the
GPS system will be made aware of this situation via a probe and
route the request accordingly."
One shortfall of the Hydra technology, acknowledged by its
supplier, is the lack of a return path. GPS may well improve the
chances of sending data to the most appropriate server, but when
the Web site returns the data it is pumped into the Internet.
Consequently, GPS cannot guarantee that you will have a decent
quality service for the entire experience.
Iain Stevenson, principal analyst at Ovum, has a more general
criticism of the ITM technologies on offer. "There are two aspects
to traffic management. One is delivering content and the other is
managing the network across which this content is delivered. One of
our criticisms of the suppliers who claim to do a bit of everything
is that they don't join this stuff up," he said.
Stevenson added that many suppliers are just providing a
stop-gap solution for customers who only consider ITM when they
have a problem. "It is still rarely a consideration at the start of
a project," he said.
"If you are an IT or Web site manager, you have a stark choice,"
warned Stevenson. "You can look at your traffic flow and decide
what is mission-critical and what isn't. For mission-critical, you
need to look for an ISP that will guarantee a quality of service
backed up with financial penalties for failure."
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How to improve online performance
At the moment, there are six major technologies claiming to
improve the Internet experience:
Content Caching
Much of the content pulled from the Internet is graphics or text
that very rarely changes. Instead of pulling this static content
from a distant server, suppliers, such as Akami and Footprint,
suggest you place it on local servers spread around the globe. The
benefits are a reduction in the demands on your Web servers and
improved performance. The downside is the expense and its
unsuitability for real-time data, such as share prices or
transactional systems.
Packet Shaping
This evolved from the telecoms industry and allows an ISP or
network manager to prioritise bandwidth depending on user,
application or location. For example, if a Web site provides vital
real-time information, requests can be prioritised over less
important e-mail traffic.
Performance measurement.
Companies such as RadView and Lucent provide diagnostic tools
for measuring both actual and simulated performance of Web sites
and the networks they run on. These software and hardware solutions
can be useful for diagnostic purposes but need to run continually
to take changes in applications into account. These tools are not
cheap and are overlooked by many potential customers keen to speed
up the development process.
Layer-7 switches
An intelligent switch that enables network traffic to be routed
according to the priority of its content. The policy would take
into account the type of user, security requirement and type of
content - customers who have opened a shopping basket could be
given priority over those just browsing. This technology is the
fastest growing and suppliers including Arrowpoint, F5, Alteon,
Extreme Networks, CyberIQ are jostling for position.
(Global) Load balancing
Load balancing allows demand to be distributed across several
local servers. The global version allows the load to be balanced
across geographically separated servers. Load balancing is aimed at
both ISPs and larger enterprise customers, while global load
balancing is aimed at much larger organisations. Most of the big
suppliers offer load balancing, including Alteon, F5 and Cisco.