CIO Briefings (5): How Schenker optimised its WAN performance

It’s day two of IP’07. Fortunately the weather is a little better today than yesterday (indeed it’s bright and sunny outside right now). That should mean the extremely orange carpets in Earls Court 2 retain their sparkle until the event wraps up this evening. And I’m very glad to report that all the inflatable meeting rooms/bouncy castles are looking positively tumescent.

We will be bringing you some of the highlights of today’s CIO Briefings live on the blog, starting with a presentation from logistics company Schenker on how it optimised its WAN performance.

10:00 – Stuart Eikins takes to the stage and outlines some of the challenges faced by the network team. The top one is changing business requirements. For example, new apps are demanded by the business with no detail of the additional bandwidth required. File sizes are increasing. The company is also rolling out a VoIP project. Another issue is the relatively high cost of bandwidth in the UK compared with the other markets Schenker operates in – you can’t just buy in extra capacity.

10:03 – The spur for the optimisation project was when a new app was introduced and had a major detrimental impact on the network. Traffic slowed considerably, which had a knock-on effect in the business, whose opinion of the IT team was damaged. The possible solutions were to add more bandwidth, but that’s not the only answer (cost being one issue). QoS/CoS in the WAN was another option. That too was dismissed – it too can be expensive and can take time to implement. Then there was customisation at the customer edge. Stuart wasn’t keen on that either.

10:06 – In the end they spoke to Exinda, which provided a loan unit for on-site evaluation. It worked. The reporting functions were crucial – it revealed that the new app had a greater footprint than originally anticipated. It helped Stuart fine tune policies to further improve the user experience, and identified other significant traffic patterns. The Exinda solution also provides real-time (as well as historical) reporting on WAN performance and monitors the service from the WAN provider (in this case, BT).

10:10 – But perhaps the key thing was optimisation, says Stuart. He can now guarantee service standards for users, reserve bandwidth for some business applications and compress certain protocols to ‘free up’ bandwidth.

10:13 – Stuart also used acceleration as well as compression on the WAN. That alone delivered on average 40% more capacity.

10:14 – Another key feature is that the company can now limit or block undesirable protocols and apps – including peer to peer. It also ensures roaming users cannot disrupt performance in branch when they visit. And that’s it – Stuart’s a happy network manager.

Tags: BT, schenker, stuart eikins