AV can cause major network traffic jams — but not if you plan for it
A slow network connection glared at by an executive on deadline is like the old saying, “A watched pot never boils.” The wait is interminable. The network connection may or may not get back to normal any time soon, and the blame falls squarely on IT every time, deserved or not.
These days, the more likely culprit is network capacity that is strained to the max. Bandwidth considered adequate just a year or two ago is now too limited. IT network management practices from those days are no longer efficient, either. These trends are bringing major challenges to IT departments that are trying to trim costs during tough economic times yet still provide the services the company wants at the quality they expect. Increasingly, those services include video on the network.
Using tools such as Blue Coat’s PacketShaper, network managers can monitor personal use of a company’s network. In this screen, YouTube traffic accounts for almost half of this company’s inbound internet traffic.
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Legitimate business video applications abound. Training is one of the most practical applications for video. Video training not only saves money and carbon footprints, it is easily repeated by the viewer if that viewer feels the need to review the information for better understanding.
Marketing couldn’t be happier now that video is available via the internet. Video was always the best way to communicate a company’s offerings — combining words and moving images delivers far more information than a press release or a product brochure with a still photograph. Now that video is so accessible and production so affordable, every product introduction, product brochure, spec sheet, corporate announcement, and any other corporate communications can be, and often is, accompanied by video. All the competition is doing video, too, so in many markets, video communications has become a mandate, not an option.
Howard Reingold, director of product management at Glowpoint, a Hillside, NJ-based telepresence and video communications service provider, sees high demand for corporate webcasting among his clients. “We are seeing an increase in usage of this technology by companies wanting to cost-effectively communicate with their employees, customers, partners, and others,” he says.
And then there’s videoconferencing, possibly the single most challenging of all internet video. CEOs embrace the ability to instantly and simultaneously communicate to an entire organization, regardless of employees’ locations. They can quickly share good news or warn of bad news before some blogger breaks the story. Presentations and collaboration no longer have geographical barriers. The popularity of videoconferencing is one key reason bandwidth baselines have risen over the past few years.
“This has been driven by the migration from standard definition video systems to high definition and now to telepresence systems,” says Reingold. But it’s not only the increase in first-time adopters.
“In the past, an enterprise might have one or two video systems at the headquarters and individual video endpoints at other key business locations,” he explains. “We are now seeing organizations that have 10 or 20 or more video endpoints at the headquarters location and five video systems at each key business location. Additionally, organizations are deploying desktop video systems. We recommend that telepresence users have 20 Mbs of bandwidth to support a true, immersive video experience.”
ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM
For many years, upgrading the network or adding hardware was the solution for keeping pace with capacity. Greater network capacity, however, only helps so far. The demands are increasing so quickly that it’s nearly impossible for an organization can upgrade hardware enough to keep up.
In the report, “Approaching the Zettabyte Era,” Cisco predicts that in 2012 the amount of telepresence traffic on enterprise WANs will be more than five times the volume of the entire U.S. internet backbone in 2000. That doesn’t even taken into consideration the likely proliferation of more affordable standard videoconferencing systems and desktop solutions.
“Video on the network, from a business perspective, is a blessing because it provides new ways of communicating,” says Dave Asprey, vice president of technology and corporate development at Blue Coat, a Sunnyvale, CAbased company that provides Application Delivery Network Infrastructure that helps organizations optimize network performance. “From a management perspective it is both a blessing and a curse — it’s a blessing because it provides incentive for IT managers to take stock of all the applications on the network and put tools in place to shape and control them. It’s a curse because, if you were getting away with a poorly managed network, you won’t be able to get away with that much longer.”
BETTER USE OF WHAT YOU HAVE
IT managers can get away with a lot, actually, for a while. When capacity is added, video, videoconferencing — even telepresence — can be accommodated. Over time, however, the percentage of network usage increases for all sorts of business and internet applications. There could be a company- wide webcast with mandatory attendance for all employees that worked beautifully last year, but this year causes frantic calls from outlying offices unable to view. The jitter-free executive telepresence meetings start to degrade in quality, so IT makes adjustments. After those adjustments, mission-critical business applications may grind to a halt..
“So they come to us to talk about how to shape the network or to move other traffic out of the way,” says Asprey. It’s a classic case, he says, that an IT manager implements a great new AV application over the network and suddenly there is a slowdown to the data center traffic or for those trying to go out to the internet. “What happens then is they ask: ‘What’s actually going on my network?’ Video and voice, too, force them to take stock of their entire array of applications that are taking up space.”
A number of companies, such as Blue Coat, offer products that help IT managers use their existing networks more efficiently. One way of doing this is by pre-determining how much bandwidth will be allocated to particular applications.
“Our latest information shows that personal use of the network, such as uploading photos to Facebook, listening to Pandora Radio, or downloading files from BitTorrent, accounts for up to 50 percent of network traffic,” says Asprey. “So some IT managers use our tools to degrade access to internet video. They are saying, ‘I will let you get to YouTube even if isn’t necessary to business, but I will limit the amount of bandwidth available for it. If there is a lot of traffic on the network, business applications will automatically have priority.’”
Businesses, he says, have different types of business-critical video, each relevant to different categories of employees. There are internal ondemand videos, live announcements, and external live or on-demand video, for example, so a solution needs to be able to address all three.
“With the full [Blue Coat] solution deployed, IT can identify which users are allowed to have access to what kind of video content,” he says. “Marketing can have unfettered access to YouTube, but another department may only access YouTube after hours.” Sometimes the restrictions are based on content, and Blue Coat’s content filtering allows IT to determine which types of sites are off limits. Pornography, for example, could be prohibited on a corporate-wide level.
Blue Coat also offers caching for ondemand video to reduce traffic. For live video, the company’s stream splitting alleviates network use by bringing a single video stream from the internet into Blue Coat’s ProxySG device, then all internal viewers are watching from ProxySG, rather than each individual connecting all the way out to the internet. “So if 10 people are watching this video, it uses only 1/10th of the bandwidth.”
PLANNING AHEAD
Another company offering network management solutions is NetScout, headquartered in Westford, MA. Eileen Haggerty, director of technical marketing, agrees that knowing what is happening on the network is key to successful management now and to planning for future growth.
“Fifteen years ago, people analyzed the number of packets and how much bandwidth they consumed,” says Haggerty. “They didn’t care as much about what those packets were doing — they simply assumed it was necessary.”
Haggerty recommends a thorough audit of all that is going on with the network, including application usage down to the protocol level before rolling out any new AV applications. The audit gives the IT manager a basis for comparison for when something goes wrong and helps prepare for when they want to add new services.
“With a data benchmark, the manager can know typical response times,” she says. “Without a benchmark, though, if employees start screaming about poor network performance and you don’t have a benchmark in place, you may not realize there is a 10 percent difference in quality, and you can’t make decisions to fix it.”
When adding new services, such as videoconferencing, the benchmark from the previous audit is of particular help during the planning phase. “They can make some active decisions from evidence based on their own network,” she says. “Then conduct is a pilot. Select some offices and participants, monitor those areas of the network to see the impact, and solicit anecdotal feedback.”
One of the current controversies of AV impact on the network is corporate use of YouTube. Some companies put their training and other videos on the public video website, believing they are saving the costs, bandwidth, and labor of storing these videos internally.
“But now,” says Haggerty, “individual employees who spend time in the office still go over the internet and pull down those training tapes.” The company succeeded in reducing the capacity demand of storage, but they lost control. “Now, the IT manager doesn’t know what the variety or volatility of that demand is going to be.”
THE FUTURE
Most observers agree one thing — this is no time to let network optimization fall behind. The demand for AV on the network is only at the start of its eventual impact. It won’t be long before IT managers will be installing telepresence systems in the CEO’s home, connecting all projectors and flat-panel monitors to the network for PC-free presentation, and placing video calling on every desktop, which will cause ad hoc use that is difficult to predict. Video, in all its variations, will continue to grow.
Says Glowpoint’s Reingold: “There is no foolproof way to ensure highquality video delivery. IT departments need to understand the impact video can have on the network and the impact that bandwidth (or lack of bandwidth) can have on video quality. Video is highly sensitive and the new higher-priced systems are even more sensitive since the video experience is so immersive.”
