Quality of service is key to bandwidth management quandary

Bandwidth is an expensive commodity for any organisation, be it a medium to large enterprise or a small to medium enterprise (SME). A viable alternative to buying more bandwidth is to optimise available bandwidth, investing in a quality of service (QoS) solution, which leverages existing network infrastructure rather than requiring the upgrading of resources.

"There will always be congestion undermining the enterprise and service providers` ability to meet the service commitments for their critical business systems," says Graham Vorster, Chief Technology Officer at Duxbury Networking.

He says the challenge is how to implement new Web-based applications without compromising business-critical applications or requiring wholesale upgrades of their network infrastructure.

"For service providers like ISPs [Internet service providers], the greatest challenge is to keep up with the ever-increasing demand of users who expect instantaneous access to mission-critical systems running on their congested corporate networks," he says.

Progress is being made via breakthrough QoS devices that enable bandwidth hungry e-business applications (like e-commerce, intranet access, Internet browsing and multimedia streaming) to share bandwidth with existing applications without affecting the response time for business-critical applications.

He says QoS is an umbrella term for a number of techniques that intelligently match the needs of specific applications to the network resources available.

"Simply put, it enables you to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time, so that they can make good business decisions," says Vorster.

QoS is even more critical to service providers that must optimise and guarantee the performance of their networks.

He says it should be considered as part of a process that employs best-of-breed techniques to intelligently match the needs of specific applications to the network resources available, to ensure that a specified throughput level can always be achieved.

Most of the QoS tools available today are comprised of disparate elements like rate shaping, queuing, caching and packet analysis.

"A good QoS solution should entail a method of intelligently allocating resources in the network so that data gets to its destination quickly and consistently," he says.

"When evaluating QoS solutions, network managers must first consider their organisations needs. They have to examine such factors like the quality of the network, the policies and priorities that need to be changed, and the policy-enforcement tools," explains Vorster.

It should offer guaranteed availability of network resources for mission-critical, interactive and time-sensitive applications. Network managers should be able to use their network resources more efficiently by prioritising mission-critical versus non-critical applications.

QoS features such as queuing, RSVP (resource reservation protocol) and multicast services, should also provide the control that is needed to handle different traffic in different ways.

According to Vorster, QoS is no longer a luxury but a necessity for large enterprises and service providers. "To be profitable and competitive, they must deploy a holistic, scalable QoS solution to optimise network efficiency, ensuring customer satisfaction, delivering on service level agreements, and deploying new and diverse e-business applications.

"Network managers who ignore QoS today will undermine the future viability and profitability of their organisations," says Vorster.