Tom Stockwell, head of hosting, security and application products, Cable & Wireless Europe, Asia & US looks at APM across the WAN

With traffic volumes on enterprise data networks rising ever-higher as organisations consolidate their applications into a handful of central data centres, many ICT departments are finding it tough to maintain service levels for the delivery of business critical applications across the network. Optimising enterprise networks to maximise the cost benefit from centralised application delivery and controlling the increasing volumes of non-mission critical traffic such as; social networking sites, web browsing and downloads, are key to avoiding uncontrolled investments in the Wide Area Network (WAN).

Application Performance Management (APM) is a fast evolving ICT service that helps solve this problem by providing unprecedented levels of visibility and control over network traffic, helping IT managers to optimise application performance across the WAN and pre-plan the impact of new applications on the network prior to deployment.

Industry Analysts Gartner tells us that: ‘Application networking services have become more business-oriented with associated service-level agreements available with a high degree of business focus’ (‘How to measure SLA Metrics for Application Networking Services, by Bjarne Munch, 1 October 2008).

This includes better application visibility, faster acceleration and optimised performance, which in turn leads to more efficient use of network bandwidth and greater employee productivity.

The state of play
Often, ICT departments make decisions about network capacity upgrades based only on an understanding of total link utilisation, believing the answer to poor network performance is to ask providers to supply additional raw bandwidth. Of course, sometimes this is the right answer. High Definition (HD) video conferencing, for instance, cannot be achieved without high bandwidth, low latency connectivity. However, this is not always the best approach. Sometimes, supplying more bandwidth simply adds more cost, and doesn’t actually improve application performance. Remember the impact of Bit Torrent and other automated download tools in the consumer space just a couple of years ago!

As more and more applications are hosted at the data centre and supplied across the WAN to users in remote locations, the performance of the network is as vitally important as the performance of the data centre itself. Today we see business critical applications such as Oracle and SAP being delivered from centralised data centres and this trend is set to continue.

Before CIOs consider costly network infrastructure solutions they should first take a look at APM.  This allows CIOs to diagnose traffic flows across their networks, and then to prioritise traffic, optimising the performance of mission critical applications. Equally, APM supports a transition from network based Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to application based SLAs.

A recent trial of APM at one of the world’s largest utility companies resulted in an impressive 60% cost saving. The company found it was spending large amounts of money on high bandwidth upgrades that it didn’t actually need. The company ran a cost-benefit analysis for bandwidth upgrade versus Cable&Wireless’ acceleration services.  The acceleration was successfully deployed, resulting in this significant cost saving.

In today’s difficult economic climate the most significant benefits of APM are: to facilitate the move to data centre centralisation and consolidation enabling the cost-effective and reliable delivery of applications; optimising the performance of applications to maximise staff productivity; to optimise WAN investment; and to reduce the total costs associated with the ownership of the infrastructure.  
 
Entering a new era
Network visibility is set to become even more important in the future. Many enterprises are now well underway with data centre consolidation projects and rollouts of bandwidth hungry, time sensitive applications, for example: IP Telephony (IPT) and High Definition Video conferencing services. High bandwidth, time critical traffic is growing rapidly, and will continue to grow in the future. APM intelligently allocates bandwidth based on how critical the application is and the time-sensitivity of the data, ensuring that call quality is maintained at a high level.

The flexibility of APM also allows applications such as social networking tools to continue to be run over the network without detracting from the performance of more business critical applications.  APM technology provides end-to-end visibility of network traffic, with real-time traffic analysis that dynamically and automatically manages parameters.

After networks have been optimised, there is also the option to move up another step, and accelerate the performance of key applications. Simply put, application acceleration solutions change the way the data is carried throughout the network to make the applications perform better over a WAN environment.