Malaysian stock broker OSK Holdings Bhd. deployed a wide-area network (WAN) almost two years ago. Initially, only the head office in Kuala Lumpur and 12 main branch offices were connected to the WAN, and it facilitated communications between the offices as well as access to back office applications on its main servers at the head office.

As business grew and more branch offices -- 61 at last count -- were linked to the WAN, traffic on the WAN became congested during peak business hours. This hampered business operations and the company knew that a solution had to be implemented before the problem grew out of control.

Craig Bruce, general manager of OSK?s information technology group, evaluated several solutions that would mitigate the data traffic congestion issue. While there were plenty of solutions available, he usually ended up being disappointed. Most of the options he evaluated were just not up to his requirements and expectations.

For instance, he says that he could have upgraded the leased line connections like what most organizations would have done. Unfortunately, it was an expensive option and it didn?t directly address the root cause of the problem.

?I could easily be upgrading it again two years down the road and this cycle could continue forever. How many times can one ask for more money before the management decides that ?enough is enough??? he says.

The alternative would be for Bruce to stop all traffic flow and only open up the WAN to certain types of critical traffic. But he realized that this approach would be just as expensive and unfeasible. ?The overheads and management would be more complicated because of the additional network configuration and human resources needed,? he says.

Bruce also looked at network monitoring tools to monitor and evaluate the network?s performance. But they couldn?t solve the problem at hand, he says.

?Most network monitoring tools merely inform you that the leased lines or routers are running at a certain capacity, and not what or who is chewing up the bandwidth,? he says.

During the evaluation period, Bruce decided to adopt a different approach to the problem. Instead of focusing on the network devices, he decided to look at the problem from the application point of view. His approach was to monitor and manage the application?s bandwidth requirement instead of the network devices.

According to Bruce, the problem with the growing bandwidth usage would be eliminated if he could configure the network to adapt to the bandwidth requirement of the applications.

He elaborates that this approach does not mean that the efficiency and importance of the leased lines, routers and other network hardware would be relegated. He still believes that they are crucial components that solidify the WAN but the emphasis should be on the business applications.

?An e-mail application that takes up a lot of bandwidth should have lower priority during peak times because it doesn?t really matter if it?s slower. No one really notices, anyway, because it?s not interactive. Instead, we should prioritize our bandwidth for mission critical applications like our daily transactional applications,? he says.

Bruce discovered that the best solution to his approach was Network Vantage from Compuware. Despite being more expensive compared to upgrading the leased line connections, he believes that it is a better investment and that it will eventually pay for itself in the long term.

Network Vantage is a passive monitoring software that can gather traffic information flow for over 2,000 applications and protocols. Some of the enterprise applications and environment supported by Network Vantage include Microsoft Exchange, SAP R3 and Oracle?s suite of products. It supports protocols such as HTTP, SIP and FTP, and is able to track information flow from peer-to-peer applications such as Kazaa and eDonkey.

The software provides network managers with a detailed view of an application?s network traffic by identifying potential problems, distinguishing between bandwidth contention, latency, and client/server response-time problems. For instance, if there is a bottleneck on the front-end, Network Vantage can identify which applications are competing for bandwidth. It helps OSK determine if the problem is due to congestion on the network and rectifies the transaction delays.

All the data gathered would help network managers to manage their network more efficiently, whether the problem resides with users, applications or hardware.

Proof of concept handy

Before OSK installed Network Vantage in March 2003, a lengthy proof of concept was first conducted a month earlier. This was the time when OSK really put the abilities of Network Vantage to test. Working directly with Compuware engineers, Bruce and his team tested Network Vantage extensively within OSK?s WAN environment to determine its actual effectiveness.

Thanks to the many exhaustive proof of concept sessions and the expertise of Compuware?s engineers, Bruce says that the actual deployment of the solution only took two days.

Nevertheless, he monitored the situation for a week. With Network Vantage, Bruce was able to obtain a clearer picture of the applications? bandwidth requirements on the WAN. With that, he was then able to draw up a quality of service (QoS) policy that ensures the mission-critical applications always get the priority.

Bruce does this by giving the applications a priority rating. During peak business hours, the applications with higher ratings get higher priority on the WAN. However, he was careful not to define too many priority levels.

He advises other organizations against defining more than one or two applications per rating level. According to Bruce, when the number of priority levels or applications to prioritize increases, the WAN will be stressed as it attempts to determine the queue order.

He explains that during peak business hours, the network would receive a lot of data from applications with various priority levels. Since the data doesn?t arrive in an orderly fashion, all of them would be put into a queue. ?When one has too many priority levels, or prioritizes too many applications per priority level, the network will struggle to sort out which data should be sent first,? he says.

The deployment of the solution provided immediate returns, Bruce says. The WAN, which was previously running at close to 80 per cent capacity during peak business hours, has now dropped to about 50 per cent at any given time. Also, since the deployment 18 months ago, the landscape of the WAN has undergone significant changes. For starters, OSK has managed to downgrade and consolidate its four leased lines, saving the company about 70,000 ringgit (US$18,400) a year.

In addition, non-mission-critical applications that were consuming far too much bandwidth were removed or downgraded, translating to even more cost savings. But more importantly, the finger pointing stopped whenever a network spike occurred. The network team now no longer pin the problem to the applications team, and vice versa for all the congestion woes.

?What we learned from the WAN is similar to watching Discovery Channel. We certainly got a few surprises of what was going in and coming out of our network. Today, we are able to quickly pinpoint and resolve the odd network spike right down to the host or user,? he says.

The biggest challenge during any major IT project implementation is almost always with the users. During this project implementation phase, Bruce concedes that the challenge was trying to change the mindset of his network team. His network team was used to the concept of managing the WAN with network devices, he says, thus coaxing them to approach the problem from the application point of view was the toughest challenge.

Nevertheless, the extensive proof of concepts and comprehensive training sessions helped the network team adapt to the changes easier, says Bruce.

Listed in his wish list now is for Network Vantage to incorporate more reporting functions, although Compuware had already released several add-on modules since the deployment. ?I could easily install an external reporting tool from Business Objects, but I?d rather wait for the enhancements from Compuware,? he says.

Justifying the investment for Network Vantage to his top management wasn?t difficult, says Bruce. Apart from the reduced cost of maintaining the leased line and business applications, the service levels and QoS with the WAN has greatly improved, he says.

He expects to see ROI in two years? time. However, he says that the stability and consistent availability of bandwidth is what really matters. ?People get more done when they know that the network and applications won?t fail on them,? he says.

Since the WAN bandwidth has been significantly optimized, it has given OSK the option to consider using bandwidth-intensive applications such as VoIP. Bruce reveals that the company will be rolling out a VoIP project at the end of the year.

?It?s the indirect benefits like this that we?re more excited about,? Bruce says. ?Some organizations may not be able to view or value such benefits but personally, it really justifies the investment made,? he says.