Cover Story
Airline Plays a Hunch
WestJet's William Lee helps keep fares low by using an intelligent application delivery appliance for WAN traffic over an MPLS network.
"When I heard about systems that offered intelligent bandwidth management resulting
in superior application performance and an
extraordinarily high return on investment,
I was more than a little skeptical," says
WestJet's William Lee.
Growth is good, but
WestJet airlines found that growing was
beginning to threaten its low fares-based
business model. Faced with a costly upgrade
for its WAN services enterprise-wide, the
airline's manager of technical
infrastructure had a hunch there must be a
better, more cost-effective alternative. He
was right.
WestJet is a Canadian
low-cost airline offering scheduled service
throughout its 47-city North American and
Caribbean network. Named Canada's most
admired corporate culture in 2005, 2006 and
2007, WestJet pioneered low-cost flying in
Canada.
The airline has grown
rapidly since 1996 when it commenced flight
operations with 220 employees and three
planes serving three destinations. WestJet
now has more than 7,000 employees, and
operates a fleet of 74 next-generation
Boeing 737s that serve 47 destinations in
Canada, the United States and the Bahamas.
By beginning its
operations on a small scale, WestJet was
able to control costs throughout the
company, and the IT department was no
exception. For its first full decade in
business, the airline was able to employ a
cost-effective Frame Relay
network service to link its data center with
the growing number of hubs and terminals.
In 2006, William Lee,
WestJet's manager of technical
infrastructure, recognized the need to
manage WAN bandwidth more effectively. "The
Frame Relay network served our needs quite
well for quite a while," he says. "But as we
grew and added a redundant data center, the
network became too complex and costly."
Which is why Lee decided
to replace the company's Frame Relay network
with a multiprotocol layer switching (MPLS)
service.
With its support for
multiple classes of service in a secure,
point-to-multipoint topology, MPLS seemed to
be the ideal solution for WestJet's growing
number of users and applications. Of
particular importance was the service-level
agreement (SLA) guaranteeing uptime for
WestJet's mission-critical applications. A
problem with MPLS, however, is that the more
granular the service gets as the primary
means to map and manage traffic, the more
expensive it becomes.
Assigning priorities
WestJet's situation is
fairly typical of many distributed
businesses. All 7,000 employees are either
occasional or regular users of the WestJet
network, which is centralized at redundant
data centers in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
The online reservation system is the most
mission-critical of WestJet's networked
applications, and this would need to be
assigned the top priority, regardless of how
bandwidth is managed.
The company also had
numerous other applications, including
e-mail, fleet maintenance, accounting and
Internet access. In addition, WestJet wanted
to implement voice-over-IP (VoIP)
communications as yet another cost-saving
measure.
Lee needed to
accommodate the
additional growth that had occurred since
converting to the MPLS service, without increasing the bandwidth of any link to any site.
Lee had a hunch there had
to be an alternative that was both more
capable and less expensive than MPLS-based
traffic management. "Vendors always promise
great results if you use their products or
services," he observes, "and some of these
claims are true. But all too often,
unfortunately, many are exaggerated. So when
I heard about systems that offered
intelligent bandwidth management resulting
in superior application performance and an
extraordinarily high return on investment, I
was more than a little skeptical."
Nevertheless, Lee decided
to check out such claims, but rather than
merely accepting the vendor's promises for
results, or those of third-party testing
labs or vetted lists of customer references,
Lee attended a trade show.
Before attending the
show, he did his homework, checking out
several vendors providing intelligent
bandwidth management, WAN optimization or
application delivery solutions. He arrived
at the show prepared with a short list of
systems and a longer list of specific,
probing questions. He wanted to know if
these systems really worked, if they were
easy to use and deploy, if they really
improved application performance and overall
bandwidth utilization, and if they were
really a good investment. He wanted the bad
news, too, being sure to ask about any
problems or pitfalls.
One of the products on
Lee's short list of systems was the
PacketShaper from Packeteer. With such a
widely used solution, Lee was able to locate
enough PacketShaper users to get answers to
all his questions. "These users all rated
the product very highly for its
comprehensive application visibility,
sophisticated bandwidth-management
capabilities, cost-effectiveness and ease of
use," Lee recalls.
Lee remained skeptical,
however, about the product's ability to meet
WestJet's driving need to keep WAN bandwidth
costs at a minimum. Specifically, Lee needed
to accommodate the additional growth that
had occurred since converting to the MPLS
service, without increasing the bandwidth of
any link to any site, especially at the data
centers, and without incurring additional
service fees for any special mapping or
provisioning within the MPLS infrastructure.
Packeteer offered to let
Lee conduct testing with a demonstration
system. The trial involved a single
PacketShaper at the primary data center that
was used to gain better visibility into all
the applications running on the network, and
to manage bandwidth utilization more
effectively with the appliance's
traffic-shaping feature.
Testing goes well
"We really liked the way
a single, central PacketShaper appliance was
able to give us such complete visibility and
control over traffic across the entire
enterprise, and knew it had improved overall
performance. But we did not fully appreciate
the extent of the improvement in application
response times and service quality until
users began to complain when the trial
ended," says Lee.
That was the defining
moment when Lee decided to deploy the
PacketShaper solution permanently in
WestJet's production network.
The initial production
deployment involved two PacketShaper model
6500 appliances in a high-availability
configuration with a single system installed
at each of WestJet's redundant data centers.
Because WestJet utilizes a centralized IT
architecture, this configuration enabled Lee
to implement packet shaping on all of the
company's many applications.
"Within a matter of
hours, the performance of our more critical
applications began to improve considerably,"
he reports. "And although we knew we had
barely begun to scratch the surface of the
appliance's full potential, we quickly
became 'happy campers' based on these
initial results."
To be effective as an
application-delivery tool, packet shaping
first requires identifying all applications
running on the network, and then assigning
each a relative priority. With the
PacketShaper's ability to identify some 500
different applications, the first
requirement is satisfied automatically.
Assigning the relative
priorities is straightforward initially, but
often requires an iterative process to
optimize the priorities for all
applications. An optimal assignment is able
to improve performance for all
mission-critical and latency-sensitive
applications, without noticeably affecting
the performance of other applications.
WestJet's number one
priority is its online reservation system.
Faster response times now afford a double
benefit: enhanced employee productivity and
greater customer satisfaction. WestJet's
other obvious high-priority application is
the VoIP-based communications system, and
voice quality improved dramatically merely
by assigning VoIP traffic a high priority.
Lee was able to achieve
these improvements by following Packeteer's
intelligence service assurance approach to
WAN optimization, which enables the
optimization of multiple business
applications without adversely impacting
either the perceived or actual performance
of most other applications.
Also essential to WestJet
is that the traffic-shaping features are
compatible with MPLS-based services.
PacketShaper employs industry standards,
such as DiffServ, type/class of service,
virtual LANs and MPLS tags, to identify and
mark individual packets to ensure that
application traffic receives appropriate
treatment in the public network
infrastructure.
Network upgraded
As the volume of traffic
continued to grow, WestJet upgraded the
configuration to redundant PacketShaper
model 10000 systems at the data centers, and
deployed model 3500 systems at 10 of its
larger bases of operation at various
airports, including some maintenance and
supply facilities. The online reservation
system and VoIP applications continue to get
the highest priority, and the company
continues to permit recreational traffic,
but the distributed configuration of
PacketShaper systems now enables WestJet to
compress traffic over the WAN.
To obtain this additional
bandwidth boost, WestJet is using
PacketShaper's application-intelligent
compression module. The module employs
various compression technologies, including
multiple compression algorithms, fragment
caching techniques, header compression and
packet bundling, to increase WAN throughput
by up to a factor of 100.
These technologies
introduce little latency to preserve the
quality of VoIP calls and other
delay-sensitive applications. The module is
installed on both model 10000 systems at the
data centers, as well as on the model 3500
systems at six of the remote locations
served by 1-Mbps links in WestJet's MPLS
network.
"Although we have yet to
formally measure the actual increase in
throughput that resulted from the use of
compression, we estimate the improvement to
be in the range of 70 percent," Lee says.
"This gain is pretty significant, and has
freed up enough bandwidth to accommodate the
growth in traffic over these relatively
low-speed links.
"As we continue to grow,
we know we will continue to need more
bandwidth," explains Lee. "But with the
PacketShapers, we will be able to postpone
these expensive upgrades as long as
possible."
By employing an effective
combination of the appliance's application
visibility, packet shaping and intelligent
compression, the fast-growing company
expects to achieve a return on its
investment in less than a year by avoiding
an increase in WAN bandwidth. Lee estimates
that the cost of additional WAN bandwidth
for a single year is more than twice the
cost of a PacketShaper system, yielding a
full payback in as little as six months.
In addition to postponing costly WAN
bandwidth upgrades, WestJet has been able to
avoid using the more expensive
multiple-traffic class-labeling service
provisions of the MPLS service. According to
Lee, "We do bandwidth provisioning on our
own with the Packet-Shapers, and we do it better and for less
money than the carrier can."
For more information
(click here)
About Packeteer
Dave Côté has served
as president, chief executive officer
and director of Cupertino, Calif.-based Packeteer since October 2002.
Previously, he served as vice president
of worldwide marketing for Integrated
Device Technology, a semiconductor
company, and as vice president of
marketing for ZeitNet, which was
acquired by Cabletron in 1996.
Dave Côté
Packeteer products
provide distributed enterprises with
fast delivery of all key business
applications, including acceleration
that uses unique intelligence about the
application and the network to target
the optimum technologies and improve
network performance. Founded in 1996,
Packeteer has more than 400 employees
and in excess of 7,000 customers.
Packeteer recently was acquired by
Blue Coat Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif.,
a manufacturer of WAN application
delivery and secure Web gateway
products. By combining PacketShaper
functionality with its ProxySG
appliance, Blue Coat will provide
customers with the ability to see
traffic on their networks and
proactively accelerate, prioritize,
limit or block it.