Protect Critical Application Performance

Procedures to ensure prompt, appropriate, and predictable performance for critical applications

Today's networks facilitate the simultaneous delivery of both mission-critical and unsanctioned applications. When low priority applications cause performance of critical applications to suffer, the application-neutral nature of IP networks and the sheer volume of traffic generated by many Internet-enabled applications combine to form one very infuriating performance problem.

The following procedure contains instructions to differentiate and protect your urgent traffic. Because part of that process is preventing others from taking the bandwidth that should rightfully go to the more urgent applications, it also contains instructions to limit bandwidth where needed.

   Procedure:

1. Develop a traffic tree, if you don't already have one.
   
   
2. Determine which applications are undermining the performance of others.
   
   
3. Identify the applications whose performance is crucial to your organization. They are probably your interactive, latency-sensitive, mission-critical applications. Examples might include SAP, Oracle, Citrix-based applications, or a particular web page. Make sure you have traffic classes for each. If PacketWise doesn't auto-discover your particular application, create a traffic class to identify the application with other criteria such as server address, port numbers, URL, or others.
   
   For more information, see Create a Traffic Class and Matching Rules.
   
   
4. Click the monitor tab and sort the Monitor Traffic list by peak bps. Any class that has peaked to more than 50 percent of the link size should be assigned a policy. Make a list.
   
   
5. Using your three lists of applications — those impacting others' performance, those that are important, and those that peak at more than 50 percent of link size — characterize your traffic, categorizing on the basis of importance, size, and sensitivity to latency and jitter.
   
   
6. Define partitions and/or policies to protect your important traffic classes. As resources, you can use:
   
   
   • Policy/Partition Guidelines (guidelines for choosing appropriate policies and partitions for specific types of traffic)
   • Suggested Policies (on-line, in-product policy suggestions)
   • Reserve Bandwidth for each of the applications you want to protect.
   • Insulate users of an application from others using the same application.
     
     
7. Define partitions and/or policies to contain your important traffic that impacts others or bursts to a large portion of the link. As resources, you can use:
   
   
   • Policy/Partition Guidelines (guidelines for choosing appropriate policies and partitions for specific types of traffic)
   • Suggested Policies (on-line, in-product policy suggestions)
   • Contain a Greedy Business Application (instructions for limiting an important application)
     
     
8. Define partitions and/or policies to contain your unimportant traffic that impacts others or bursts to a large portion of the link. As resources, you can use:
   
   
   • Policy/Partition Guidelines (guidelines for choosing appropriate policies and partitions for specific types of traffic)
   • Suggested Policies (on-line, in-product policy suggestions)
   • Limit an Application's Total Bandwidth (generic instructions for limiting with a partition)
   • Block Unwanted Traffic (instructions for completely stopping one type of traffic)
     
     
9. Turn on PacketWise's compression. This feature offers lossless compression and acceleration of network traffic by creating compression tunnels between compression-enabled PacketShapers. No manual configuration is required, as the PacketWise application-specific plug-in architecture automatically selects the algorithm that will yield the best compression ratio for each compressible application or service type.
   
   The compression feature also allows you to define which hosts are allowed to send data through the compression tunnel (setup compression hosts), or restrict the PacketShaper units that can be a tunnel partner (setup compression partners).