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Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Anil Chopra
WANs are a critical part of most IT infrastructure today, and can't be ignored. It's not just about maintaining your Internet connectivity anymore. That can easily be managed through bandwidth management and traffic shaping solutions. Today, the technologies and applications that can work over WANs have grown far beyond that. Disaster recovery and BCP, VoIP, video conferencing, web conferencing, online collaboration, VPNs, branch office connectivity, e-commerce applications are just a few of the applications that require WAN links. Then of course, there are the business applications like ERP, CRM, and even legacy or home grown applications that need to work over WAN links. Every organization today has already deployed at least some of these applications already, and the trend is to add more load to the WAN links. In fact, when we interacted with key IT decision makers across the country, we found that nearly 60% of them were already running their business applications across their WAN links, followed by VPN connectivity, messaging and collaboration tools, remote file sharing, and Voice over IP. They were all using so many applications already that there weren't as many deployments planned in the future.
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The only sizable deployment seemed to be Voice over IP, with nearly 45% of the respondents saying they're planning to shift to. This brings us to an interesting question. Are your WAN links geared to handle this load and the possible future load? Even if you don't add more applications, you're likely to add more users and connect locations to it. This would increase both cost and complexity of the whole setup. How well prepared are you for this? If you haven't really given it a serious thought, then maybe it's time you did. For instance, when an ordinary connection to the Internet goes down, you start getting frantic calls. What would happen if a WAN link connecting two key locations of your organization goes down? Not only would that lead to panic, but possible business loss as well. This calls for some thinking and creating a proper strategy to manage your WAN links. We interacted with key CIOs and IT managers from across the country to determine how were they managing their respective WAN infrastructures, what problems were they facing, and more importantly, how were they resolving the same.
Identify the key issues
The first thing to do is of course to identify the key issues you're facing with your WAN links, and try to formulate a plan to eliminate those. The biggest issue that seems to give CIOs nightmares is (no points for guessing) the uptime and very availability of their WAN links. There were lots of cases reported of WAN links getting cut, break downs happening, link failures, etc, leading to down time. WAN mangers seem to be having issues with the very reliability of their WAN links and whether connectivity will be there. In fact, all other issues cropped up in miniscule numbers compared to uptime and availability. These were security, speed, link utilization, and other issues like cost, DR, etc. Organizations with a large number of WAN links experience a different problem of ensuring all their WAN routers are compatible. They must therefore follow standards or shift to routers from the same vendor. All this is indeed a concerning revelation. In an age where WANs are becoming the basic communications backbone of the company, CIOs are still facing problems in the very availability of their links.
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| Applications currently running across the WAN infrastructure |
WAN applications planning to deploy in the near future |
When it comes to WAN link performance, issues like latency, access speed, fluctuations in the link, available bandwidth utilization, and high response time become critical, and must be addressed. So how do you resolve these issues? Where do you start?
First thing's first-get yourself backup links for all the critical WAN links in your organization. Ideally, it should be from a different service provider to ensure maximum availability. A lot of organizations resort to ISDN links for backup. Possibly that's why the number of current ISDN deployments that we got from our survey were so high. More over, you might also like to keep some spare WAN equipment as well to ensure you're prepared for any eventualities due to equipment failure. For the remaining issues like security, bandwidth utilization, etc, you would need a mix of usage policies, and products. Then of course, ensure that you fix stringent SLAs with your service providers. Ensure that you get timely reports on WAN links utilization, and availability of various services being provided.
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| What's the biggest challenge you face with users of your WAN infrastructure? |
Define who'll manage your links
Another critical decision that will affect your WAN link management is the manpower you're using for managing it. You need to determine who's going to manage it. Should you have in house staff for it, have the ISP do it, or outsource it to a third party altogether? This forms a critical part of a WAN strategy. If you're adding more locations into your WAN infrastructure, then do you really want to deploy a person at each location for managing the links? Even if the links are mission critical, it's not as if they'll continue going down very frequently. What growth in career can you give to employees who're sitting in all the remote locations managing WAN links? Not much. So it's better that you either outsource it to your ISP or to a third party as a part of a bigger AMC. A remote branch of a bank for instance would require a WAN link to connect to the core branch. It may not be feasible to deploy somebody full time at the branch just for the WAN links, or for even managing the IT setup. This call has to be taken based on the size of the branch. So create a list of all branches according to size and then check for the feasibility of outsourcing vs. in-house management. In our survey, 41% of the respondents had in house staff for managing their WAN links, but there were another 32% who were getting it managed by their ISP. Another 18% had outsourced it to a third party. The key point to note here is that you need to ensure that you've defined the SLAs and are ensuring that they're followed.
The right mix of access technologies
If your organization is geographically dispersed, then chances are you would be using different types of connectivity technologies. Even in our interactions with key IT decision makers, we found a multitude of technologies being used. ISDN topped the charts with 50% of respondents already using it. DSL, VSATs, and radio links are the next most popular, followed by minor portions of other technologies. The key here is to be able to juggle between technologies properly. You need to be able to use the right technology in the right place. For this, an understanding of key WAN technologies, their advantages and limitations is a must.
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| WAN infrastructure management |
Establish control
Most of the respondents to our survey said that the key issue they face with their users is enforcing access policies. This is easier said than done, as it could end up becoming a sensitive issue. What if for instance, you find somebody very senior in the management misusing bandwidth? Even if access policies are in place, it would be difficult for anybody from the IT department to put an end to it. What's required therefore is to bring the HR department into the picture. Route the policies through them.
As WAN has far lesser bandwidth than a regular LAN, it becomes a precious resource. Any kind of misuse can choke the bandwidth. On top of that, if you have users misusing the links, life can really become difficult. Remember the days when P2P clients and download accelerators were a nightmare? Somebody on the network would be running one of these and hogging up all Internet bandwidth. Today, there are enough filtering solutions to filter out such troublemakers. What about filters for your other WAN applications? For this, you need to have clearly laid out usage guidelines. Plus, of course, you need to implement the right QoS (Quality of Service) policies to ensure effective use of the bandwidth. We received a number of solutions from the respondents to our survey, which they've already implemented. One is to give authenticated access, and second is to give it to limited individuals. You could also put a time limit on the login. QoS and traffic prioritization is of course an option.
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| How statisfied are you with the level of service given by your WAN service provider/ISP? |
Manage your service provider
A majority of our respondents said that they were just satisfied by the level of service given by their WAN service provider. No wonder then that uptime and availability were their key issues. Moreover, the two toughest tasks faced by a majority of our respondents were that they found it a challenge to define the SLAs and they never got the bandwidth promised by their service provider. The third majority said too much downtime was their key concern. How do you therefore handle the service provider? Some of the respondents went as far as to put financial penalty clauses in their SLAs. Yet others held regular meetings with their service providers to discuss concerns and issues, and asked for regular reports. The key thing is that if you keep these reports handy, then they become very useful at the time of renewing your annual contract with them. If you're not happy, then you can use the same to switch and negotiate with another service provider.
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| What's the key issue you face with your WAN service provider/ISP? |
Source: PCQuest
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