Bandwidth management, QoS, monitoring and reporting

Bandwidth management appliances allocate bandwidth to mission-critical applications, slow down non-critical applications, and stop bandwidth abuse in order to efficiently deliver networked applications to the branch office. The primary goal of Quality of Service (QoS) is to provide priority including dedicated bandwidth, controlled jitter, and atency (required by some real-time and interactive traffic) to applications traveling on the network.

End-to-end performance monitoring and reporting provides the WAN visibility required to analyze the traffic; Layer 7 QoS allocates bandwidth according to rules and policies. Traffic is automatically categorized into application classes.

Easy to understand shaping policies such as "real-time" or "block" govern the flow of traffic. Packet fragmentation assures that large data packets do not violate VoIP/video latency budgets, while packet aggregation ensures higher WAN capacity and stabilizes jitter. This guarantees that delay-sensitive traffic such as VoIP can be allocated a minimum amount of bandwidth to ensure optimal voice quality even when WAN links are congested or oversubscribed.

The net result of these features is that very high data transfer speeds, some times as much as 10X, are achieved. This technology has come as a boon to the Internet-starved industry achievement of higher bandwidth speeds and means that organizations can now look forward to explosive growth in their Internet business.

The demand for Internet bandwidth is bound to increase by the day. The application acceleration technology is expected to give the much-needed respite to ISPs and the Government to better plan and implement the last miles on the best possible media and resolve the last mile bottlenecks forever.