F & B Autonomic Networking
Chalk Talk "Come and see what an Autonomic System is."
Solution Overview
Control
Control functions are unique to Ipanema. Because of its system design, the Ipanema Solution allows network managers to concentrate for the first time on high level activities that make it easy to deliver on the network's perennial promise to be a strategic business function.
Control features allow to:
- Control the network with Application Service Levels
- Manage the network cost / application performance trade off
- Understand the application delivery chain
Control the network with Application Service Levels
The network is critical to the business of the enterprise. The WAN is the piece of the infrastructure that is the most shared among users and applications. Managing its performance so that it correctly serves the needs of user of critical application is fundamental. Managing this performance in terms of delay or loss is not enough.
Delay or loss on a link tells nothing about the performance of individual SAP or Citrix sessions. Enterprises need to setup key performance indicators that help understanding the contribution of the network to productivity.
The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) reported by Ipanema is the right indicator for VoIP or IPT flows. As the MOS is only applicable to voice, Ipanema as developed in addition a universal indicator that provides for each application and each user what is the real contribution of the network to quality of experience.
The Application Quality Score gives a value between 0 and 10 that indicate whether or not the network is doing its job for business critical applications and users. This quality information is delivered by the system through multiple tools that allow to understand the health of network applications globally and in real-time. Thanks to Ipanema, the enterprise is able to verify and control service levels for all applications running over the global WAN.
Guarantee application performance from high level objectives
Enterprises understand that WAN Optimization and Application Performance Management technologies are important to obtain an excellent application performance over their network. But the price they need to pay to embrace those technologies is very high. Application aware devices needs to be configured and, even more than routers, they need to have their parameters adapted to the network and IT environment.
As enterprises today integrate application aware technologies in the design and planning of their VPN infrastructure, finding means to hide all the complexity in aligning the technology to business goals becomes crucial. Without a paradigm shift in terms of configuration and on-going management models, the benefits of WAN Optimization will be limited to reduced, simple scopes.
Using the notion of Autonomic Networking, Ipanema unleash the power of WAN Optimization and Application Performance Management by providing a fully global, automated and dynamic way of bridging the gap between the enterprise business and the application aware VPN.
Thanks to a unique management model based on high level objectives, application performance can be guaranteed for business critical applications anytime, anywhere.
Manage the network cost / application performance trade off
In order to deliver the appropriate service levels to end-users, the appropriate bandwidth must be deployed at the different sites.
The Rightsizing feature of the Ipanema System analyze network capacity and user demand compared to performance objectives. From this analysis, it computes the exact relationship between bandwidth and service levels.
In this example, the Rightsizing report shows that, on the considered site and chosen time period (which can extend into the future thanks to our trending algorithms), with 512Kbit/s of access link capacity, users of critical applications would have been served with the appropriate amount of network resources 100% of the time, while users of non critical applications would have their quality targets met only between 80% and 90% of the time. For all users of all applications to receive good quality levels 100% of the time, about 1.7 Mbit/s would have been required. That is more than a 3x difference in link size, for a difference of non-critical applications missing some of their performance targets just 10%-15% of the time.
Which is the best point on the application performance/link cost curve? This is a question that for the first time can be asked and answered with our Rightsizing report.
It is a completely new way of sizing network links. It is much more aligned with the needs of the business than any other capacity planning solution.
Understand the application delivery chain
When troubleshooting application performance, it is important to be able to identify the individual impact of each segment of the application delivery chain.
Thanks to a comprehensive set of metrics, Ipanema is able to isolate the contribution to the performance of applications of:
- The WAN cloud as delivered by the service provider – those indications can be used for example to check the WAN readiness for demanding applications such as VoIP
- The WAN including the impact of WAN Optimization measured from LAN to LAN
- The server/client for TCP flows
Encourage good practices with performance based cost allocation
The Ipanema System collects information about what volume and quality for each application is really delivered to their end-users.
A dedicated set of tools enables flexibly collating this information to precisely allocate costs to the different business units thus encouraging good business practices, and meeting a critical need for those organizations where IT chargeback is a perennial problem.
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