Overview
The Converged Traffic Manager (CTM) offers superior cost savings with a compression and caching solution that can expand WAN bandwidth by as much as 10X. The benefit to the enterprise is measurable as bandwidth is freed to improve application performance while delaying costly bandwidth upgrades.
By integrating compression with traffic management policies, the CTM allows network managers to align the objectives of optimal WAN efficiency with best application performance. Any application can be compressed, any application can be QoS-managed, and QoS policies can be applied to any compressed stream.
This application-aware compression solution also supports exception rules. Applications like VoIP and Citrix, that have already been compressed, can be specifically excluded from compression while their traffic management policies are still enforced. Applications that are extremely latency sensitive may also avoid compression. This further enables the enterprise to manage cost while protecting application performance guarantees. The solution additionally meets three important requirements:
- Maximises the compression ratio
- Minimises network latency for important applications
- Maximises scalability in both the number of sites and size of the WAN link
Compression can be performed at many levels in the OSI model. Applications such as Citrix and IP video integrate compression at the application layer (Layer 7). Others require compression to be applied by the network. Converged Access provides an application-aware compression solution that can apply compression selectively based on the application.
Transparent web caching further increases compression efficiency. Converged Access CTM determines which data could potentially be served out of local storage and transparently redirects the request to the proxy. If the content is locally available and determined to be “fresh”, it is served out of the local cache. This saves WAN bandwidth, hence improving the compression ratio significantly. Caching also improves application response time as the response to the request does not traverse the WAN.
The benefits of compression and caching are shown in the following example. On a T1 WAN link, the raw data throughput (compressed) is 1.5 Mbps. Assuming a 3:1 compression ratio, the LAN throughput (uncompressed) will be 4.5 Mbps. If, in the mean time 10 megabits were served out of the cache, the effective throughput on the LAN side is 14.5 megabits per second, which yields a compression ratio of 9.6.
Ease of deployment is provided with a simple compression configuration tool that enables network managers to centrally establish the network paths that are eligible for compression. These are then centrally distributed to the sites around the network.
...Overview
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