Exinda Blog

Having just returned from the Interop show in Las Vegas last week, I am struck by a subtle change in the way WAN optimization vendors are looking at the problems customers face. It is more apparent than ever that a shift is occurring away from what I would call WAN optimization 1.0, which was very acceleration or “bit” centric, and towards WAN optimization 2.0, which is very user experience and assurance-centric.

Mobile workers will often face a different set of challenges than those working in a branch office. This also creates a slightly different set of requirements for client based WAN optimization technologies.

One of the most important characteristics of UPM is the word Unified. Technically, when we say unified, we really mean it. At both the hardware and software layers Exinda is a unified solution.

There are a number of metrics, or key performance indicators, that network administrators need to observe to understand how healthy their network and applications running on the network are.

Back in the early days of WAN Optimization, it was all about congestion and QoS. Simple logic led one to think that if the problem was congestion, adding more bandwidth was the easy way to make more room. Businesses that went this route soon found they still had congestion. In effect, they had put a bandage on the symptom without dealing with the underlying cause of the problem.

In networks today there is a critical disconnect. Why is it that networks can have lots of capability, but you still get lots of congestion and application performance issues? You get problems, conflicts, applications that don’t perform in the manner that businesses need them to work. All of this is based on a critical disconnect on the way applications are developed and the way they are actually delivered to networks. It comes to the fact that application development typically lacks network integration intelligence. That means the way the application is developed does not account for the way it will need to work on the network, and the way it will need to interact with other applications that are using that same network. And it is the lack of understanding of this shared network underneath that really causes a lot of the conflicts today.

Typical Layer 3 parameters

• Traffic throughput (Mbps)
• Number of flows
• Concurrent connections
• New connections
• RTT (Round Trip Time)
• Transaction Delay – Network
• Transaction Delay – Server
• Transaction Delay – Total
• Network Latency
• Network Jitter
• Network Loss

Network Health / Efficiency

Exinda has issued a new publication that offers insights and strategies to align your network strategy when rolling out a Unified Communications project. Entitled "Managing Your Network at the Speed of Change", this e-publication includes the Gartner research "Top 10 Tips to Prepare your Network for Unified Communications and Collaboration".