The demands on enterprise networks are regularly increasing. With new paradigms such as cloud computing and other data-intensive methods of running an office, networks are expected to provide data transfer at a high rate. While increasing computational power and upgrading network hardware can help a company achieve acceptable performance, it is sometimes necessary to use network bandwidth in a smarter, more effective manner. A key technology that is helping companies achieve this goal is Unified Bandwidth Management.
Unified Bandwidth Management (UBM) utilizes a set of techniques to help operators of enterprise-class networks achieve speedy, reliable cloud performance. Some of the techniques used to achieve this improved performance include the following:
– Traffic shaping
Traffic shaping is fundamental to QoS optimizations. UBM allows operators to choose one of twelve priority levels for applications and types of traffic, allowing fine-grained control. By prioritizing some forms of traffic over others, networks can intelligently increase the speed of critical traffic. For clients, traffic shaping can make high-bandwidth activities operation run more quickly, which enables users to spend more time working and less time staring at a spinning hourglass.
– Network load balancing
Many enterprise-class networks utilize two or more WAN connections. Network load balancing allows clients to use both of the connections simultaneously. By using two connections at once, performance can be increased dramatically. Speedy cloud performance using simultaneous connects can allow operations to approach the speeds expected with native applications. Additionally, network load balancing provides redundancy in case one of the WAN connections goes offline.
– Site2Site optimizations
Site2Site allows applications to form multiple tunnels to increase their effective bandwidth. Site2Site provides further reliability to the UBM scheme by maintaining multiple connections and increasing network redundancy. Site2Site also eases the use of compression, which can substantially reduce bandwidth consumption and improve a cloud's speed.
UBM can further be used as a VPN virtualization appliance, allowing companies to easily expand their operations across multiple locations. VPN virtualization is becoming a core technology for enterprise-class cloud implementations, and UBM is designed to complement VPN virtualization's paradigms.
UBM is being used at an increasing number of large corporations and has been shown to be scalable for some of the largest technology companies. The cloud revolution is only beginning, but early indications are showing that UBM will be a leading technique for providing the performance necessary for enterprise-class networks to operate effectively while taking advantage of what cloud networks have to offer.
