Technology clinic

May 22 2008 nebusiness.co.uk

Technology clinic: Solving business problems through the creative use of technology

Our corporate head office is based in Newcastle and we have 20 branch offices across the UK at locations such as London, Manchester and Birmingham. Like many companies we have centralised our IT facilities so our systems are all located in our corporate data centre. We have over 100 mobile users that, along with the 20 branches, access these systems regularly. Senior management have asked me to write a report on how we tackle our two key problems with the current strategy: 1) bandwidth costs are high 2) users at remote locations often complain about poor application performance. How do I tackle these problems?

A: Well, my first comment is that you should not change your current strategy! Centralisation of IT infrastructure is largely regarded as industry best practice and standards such as ITIL® (the IT Infrastructure Library) will support you on this. Waterstons are a big advocator of infrastructure centralisation and have helped a number or organisations achieve centralisation and standardisation strategies whilst overcoming the hurdles of WAN (Wide Area Network) limitations. Cost, availability, latency and performance tend to be the main problems.

So how do we do it? – Well, first of all there is a new concept in the industry called “WAN Optimisation” or “WDS” (Wide area Data Services). A number of vendors are providing products that make best use of existing WAN capabilities by intelligently minimising the amount of data that is transferred over the WAN link. The market leader in WDS is a company called “Riverbed”. Waterstons have used Riverbed and in many cases we have seen performance improvements of up to 50 times! Riverbed addresses the user performance problem by minimising the number of ‘rounds trips’ used in a typical WAN data connection. It also reduces bandwidth consumption through a combination of compression and a clever proprietary technology called SDR (Saleable Data Referencing). The end result is improved user performance and a reduction in bandwidth usage.

In addition to Riverbed, companies like Packeteer can help optimise WAN capabilities by intelligently directing traffic through the most suitable route. This idea is best suited to large organisations with a meshed network where there are multiple links between sites.

The number of WAN options available to organisations has grown in recent years and many companies are now taking advantage of wireless technology. This tends to be a lot cheaper than physical data connections supplied by ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) and some companies are now running high speed wireless connections across hundreds of miles. The old issues of security and weather disruption have now largely been overcome. As ISP’s are faced with increasing competition, prices are now cheaper than ever before and the options are greater. National Ethernet, MPLS and SDSL are just three examples of offerings that should be explored by any business designing or addressing their wide area network concerns. I believe the key to resolving the problems you describe lies in a combination of the technologies and concepts described above, however it is vitally important that the right solution is applied in the right place.

Richard O’Connor is a senior consultant and Security and Infrastructure specialist at Waterstons, who provide a range of value adding consulting, technology and outsourcing services to companies across the UK.   

PAGE TWO: Security