Ask the Expert Controlling Telco Costs

Datacenter Consolidation

What is the best way to simplify the management of our key business applications?

The Issue

Consolidation of servers has a lot of benefits, including a dramatic reduction of management costs. However, server consolidation means that end-users who are accessing applications from the LAN today will in the future access them from the WAN. They will face severe performance degradations caused by higher network delay and decreased bandwidth unless planned correctly.

There are three key issues that cause application performance degradations:

The bandwidth issue:
The performance of many applications is related to the available bandwidth.
The TCP issue:
Design limitations mean that TCP is not able to utilise all available network resources.
The application protocol issue:
Many applications are not designed for the WAN but rather the LAN; they use chatty protocols, meaning that the application protocol relies on too high a ratio of protocol exchanges when transferring data. As network delay increases, their performance degrades significantly.

The Solution

These bottleneck issues can be addressed in different ways. All application protocol bottlenecks without exception can be removed by updating the application design to take into account WAN-style network delays. Microsoft, for example, has been doing this for many years. Exchange combined with Outlook cache mode exhibits major performance improvements over its predecessors when used over the WAN. CIFS, a protocol known for its poor WAN performance, has been completely redesigned to work over the WAN.

Computrad can address these 3 key application performance bottleneck issues by providing acceleration thus mitigating the low–bandwidth and the higher-latency WAN characteristics when compared with the LAN.