Applications and network performance optimisation

A new environment presents new challenges

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Adding bandwidth isn't enough anymore
Facilitating data backup and recovery
Creating new efficiencies
Why Juniper Networks?
Other IBM and Juniper Networks solutions

Enhancing performance in a variety of WAN scenarios
Consolidating infrastructures to enable growth
Why IBM?
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Your workers, customers and partners demand anywhere, anytime access to information. This new business reality presents new problems. For one, how do you connect the far-flung locations where remote and mobile people work – including branch offices – so that everyone achieves the application and data performance they need?

Moreover, new business demands can create intense pressure on expanding networks and applications. Organisations must find ways to reduce application "latency" – the lag in activity or performance that can occur while an application works across distance. Latency is a key concern since it can hinder user productivity; disrupt business processes; jeopardise data integrity; and damage business relationships, revenue streams and supply chains.

Adding bandwidth isn't enough anymore

At the same time that they are grappling with the demands of a new business landscape, many organisations are also realising that the traditional approach to improving application and network performance – adding more and more bandwidth – is no longer viable. Aside from being expensive, increasing bandwidth doesn't address of the issues of latency and packet loss that plague many applications over distance.

IBM's application and network performance optimisation (ANPO) solution offering is a powerful alternative to simply adding bandwidth in response to application and data needs. Designed to enhance the end-user experience by reducing application latency, this solution deploys appliances and software from leading manufacturers at branch and central locations. The solution reduces the overall volume of WAN traffic by using compression and caching, and by analysing data as it moves back and forth between sites in order to transmit only new or changed data.

In addition to enhancing the end-user experience, these appliances and software can lower expenses by helping to reduce fixed server costs, server operation costs and the need to purchase bandwidth. When using the traditional approach, many companies have found that they buy more bandwidth than they need, even as they fail to make optimum use of the bandwidth they have. The ANPO solution can move data more effectively so applications can run faster, while also helping you achieve greater IT efficiencies through consolidation of servers, storage and data centres.

Enhancing performance in a variety of WAN scenarios

ANPO services can enable improvements for three key scenarios:

WAN refreshes – assists with upgrading technology and routers and with managing bandwidth costs
Server or data centre consolidation – assists with improving file/print, e-mail and backup performance and application and software distribution, and provides support for compliance initiatives
Solving issues of slow application performance – assists with centralising applications as well as exchange and Web servers, file sharing, and software distribution; can also enhance new application rollout

In each of these scenarios, enhancing application and network performance helps you provide LAN-like response – with reduced latency – for enhanced branch access to centrally hosted applications, servers and storage. You can improve linkages across data centres and with branch locations while helping to reduce disruption to business processes and avoid loss of end-user productivity. Application and network performance optimisation services can help you:

Increase end-user productivity
Improve linkages across data centres with branch locations
Reduce your branch IT expenditure for hardware systems, software licenses and support resources

Facilitating data backup and recovery

When it comes to data backup and restore requirements, the ANPO solution can help there too. As companies grow, many discover that daily mirroring of their data can take more than 24 hours – which results in incomplete backup sets, since data is constantly changing. An incomplete backup can have devastating consequences if and when the need for data restoration arises.

With the ANPO solution, you can achieve reliable and complete data backup, with daily mirroring and improved data recovery capabilities. In addition, the backup process is made even more efficient because backups contain only new or changed data.

Consolidating infrastructures to enable growth

Application and network performance optimisation services can address a number of issues that are driving server consolidation. Principal among these is growth – in the number of branch offices and servers and in the amount of data that is transmitted between them.

To meet compounding rates of server and data growth, business must hire staff to manage distributed servers and assume the costs of refreshing programs for distributed software and hardware. When you add in the costs of meeting security and compliance requirements for data located on servers outside of managed data centres, you can begin to see why consolidating infrastructures is an attractive business proposition.

Combining multiple data centres or moving servers from numerous branches to a central location can simplify infrastructure and maintenance, save money, and enhance security and compliance. However, while servers may move, end users remain in dispersed locations, and they can suffer performance and productivity losses if their applications and data experience latency.

By contrast, server consolidation enabled by the ANPO solution can enhance application performance, since it reduces the number of servers located in branches, helps lower the costs incurred at remote locations, and leverages current investments in centralised applications and facilities. The result is:

LAN-like service for remote users
Better integration between the data centre and branch infrastructures, including multivendor environments
Lowered expenditures on WAN bandwidth

Creating new efficiencies

Consolidation and centralisation also can create staff efficiencies in network oversight and application support. That's because consolidation supports centralised and comprehensive management in several areas:

Central configuration
Device groupings
Bandwidth utilisation by applications
Enhanced monitoring, statistics and alerts

Since setup is automated, with devices automatically discovering one another and negotiating optimisation capabilities, IT staff is freed up to focus on other tasks. Staff benefit from intuitive, graphical command line interfaces, together with role-based administration designed to minimise unauthorised changes and reduce human error. All supported by an architecture that can scale to thousands of nodes and provide redundancy and recovery in addition to performance enhancements.

Why IBM?

If you have remote locations, then you depend on a WAN. You need an IT partner that can serve you wherever you are. IBM's global reach can deliver the application and networking performance expertise you need when and where you need it, delivered via a combination of onsite and remote design and implementation activities provided by IBM and IBM Business Partners.

IBM has key strategic relationships with major network equipment such as Juniper Networks and software providers – industry leaders in delivering these solutions and services. Our relationships with these vendors afford helps us contribute to the development of technologies and establish processes and best practices that can provide "best fit" technology solutions and improve the potential results for our clients.

With IBM, you get a comprehensive range of services, a single point of accountability, and a partner that can work with you to meet your business and technical goals through projects designed to enhance your complex, mission-critical networks. We can provide tools for evaluating, sizing and recommending implementation, as well as help you determine ROI calculations for server and data centre consolidations. You get industry-leading knowledge, expertise and intellectual capital – so you can focus on your core competencies while IBM designs and implements the solution and provides outstanding service and support.

Why Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks' application performance solutions fuel high-performance businesses with the industry's most complete solution for addressing network and application performance, delivering LAN-like application availability for users regardless of location.

Juniper Networks' WX platform speeds up applications over your WAN using a mix of bandwidth management, compression, caching, path optimisation, and protocol acceleration techniques. The WX application acceleration platforms work end to end with all types of applications, including Web-based, client-server, custom software, voice and video.

Only the WX platform offers sequence caching, which can lower bandwidth needs by 98% for file sharing and data replication processes. The WX platform includes a broad set of management tools for monitoring and reporting on WAN and application performance. With the WX platform, you can ensure that remote performance remains on par with local access, even over constrained global links and in cases where many applications contend for the same bandwidth.