WAN optimization

WAN optimization supports best practices

ITIL guidelines provide a roadmap for achieving IT service management.

by Frank Lyonnet

Pressed by new compliance regulations, diminishing budgets and requests by senior executives to run IT more like a business, CIOs are looking at ways to implement formal processes onto IT activities. Many have turned to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for guidance on how to set up best practices for organizing all areas of IT under a service paradigm.

The ITIL is a collection of best practices or guidelines describing how to deliver IT services efficiently by improving management processes across IT departments. Developed by the British government for its own use, it is now the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world.

The potential benefits of ITIL adoption are reduced costs, improved productivity, reduced time to market and competitive advantage. ITIL supports IT operational processes such as change, capacity, configuration and service-level management; incident and problem management; and financial management.

To harness the power of ITIL, organizations need the following:

• a common language to communicate effectively with end-users;
• factual, real-time information about application performance over the network;
• the ability to link performance to cost;
• the capability to minimize incidents and brownouts; and
• the capacity to simplify change management.

WAN optimization has the potential to improve performance and integration of the network, and many concepts behind ITIL apply directly to WAN application-performance management. WAN optimization can compress data streams, monitor traffic flows, prioritize traffic via quality of service (QoS), and manage applications from a protocol perspective. This technology is also considered an effective method of acceleration, a technology that gives priorities to business applications, and an application that provides insight on network flow and behavior (visibility).

Looking at WAN optimization on a more global and strategic basis, however, shows promise in support of ITIL best practices. A strategic view can be used to deliver global control and understanding of network contribution to end-user productivity. Enterprises employing this approach can use network application-governance functions to directly support ITIL. A strategic WAN-optimization solution should be ITIL compliant with its acceleration, QoS and visibility components.

Acceleration typically provides the expected results, but can also add to the inability to determine network behavior on application performance. Acceleration gains should be handed over to a smart, global and dynamic network resource-allocation system. Tight integration between acceleration and a dynamic QoS mechanism can ensure that acceleration is always providing an overall benefit.

Policy-based QoS is fine in a static world, but the world of IT moves fast. Objective-based QoS lets managers think about the desired quality of experience (the objectives), and lets a distributed algorithm concentrate on optimal dynamic policies.

Local visibility is a piece of the puzzle, but needs to be assembled and made meaningful to the global and end-user-centric ITIL concepts. Visibility that addresses both local and global issues and that uses quality-of-experience indicators to report on network behavior toward application is the only way to comply with ITIL.

If organizations make the WAN optimization components of acceleration, QoS and visibility ITIL compliant, ITIL areas surrounding service-level management are then presented. By using a rightsizing module, how much bandwidth is required at a given level of service can be determined, clearly linking application performance to cost and contributing to capacity management. A chargeback module that takes into account the delivered service levels enables the network to become a crucial piece of financial management.

Frank Lyonnet is vice president of product management, Ipanema Technologies, Waltham, Mass.

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