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Transcript
Security
Empowers
Business
WHITEPAPER
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN, INTERNET
ACCESS LINK AND APPLICATION TRAFFIC
In the battle for bandwidth on congested WAN and Internet access links, demanding applications, such as video, mobile
devices or social media, can flood capacity, undermine the performance of critical applications and cause poor user
experience. Abundant data, devices and protocols that swell to consume all available bandwidth, network bottlenecks, and
new, popular applications – they all seem to conspire against critical application performance.
Identifying performance problems is a good first step, but it’s not enough. PacketShaper solves performance problems by
controlling bandwidth allocation with flexible policies to protect critical applications, limit greedy and recreational traffic, and
block malicious activities.
Bandwidth minimums and/or maximums can be applied to each application, session, user, and/or location. Each type of
traffic maps to a specific bandwidth allocation policy, ensuring that each receives an appropriate slice of bandwidth.
This paper describes common application performance problems, proposes a few alternative solutions, and then delves
into detail about Blue Coat’s control features.
The Performance Problem
Changes in devices, contents, applications and network environments
have wreaked havoc on performance.
Increasing traffic, diverse performance requirements, and capacity
mismatch between local and wide-area networks have prompted the
decline. Traffic growth stems from trends in applications, networks, and
users behaviors:
• More application traffic: An explosion of application size, user
demand, and richness of media
• More mobile devices: As businesses embrace new technology
and user trends, supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in
the enterprise network is becoming a commonly accepted and
standard practice
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
INTERNET ACCESS LINK AND
APPLICATION TRAFFIC
©
BLUE COAT SYSTEMS, INC
• Recreational traffic: Abundant traffic resulting from trends in web
and application based traffic: video streaming (e.g. YouTube, NetFlix),
social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), web browsing, interactive
gaming, and more
• Web-based applications: Applications with a web-based user
interface can consume 5 to 10 times more bandwidth than
thick clients
• Cloud and SaaS applications: Enterprise applications that run over
the WAN or Internet instead of being confined to a single machine
• Datacenter consolidation: A trend to combine datacenters and
reduce the number of application servers, forcing previously local
traffic (high bandwidth, low latency, and low cost) to traverse the WAN
or Internet (low bandwidth, high latency, and expensive)
• Voice/video/data network convergence: One network that supports
voice, video, and data with their variety in bandwidth demands and
performance requirements
• SNA/IP convergence: An IP network that supports SNA applications
using TN3270 or TN5250; without SNA networks’ controls, legacy
applications usually suffer a drop in performance
• Disaster readiness: Redundant datacenters, mirroring large amounts
of data
• Security: Viruses, Phishing, Advanced Persistent Threats (APT)
and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks through encrypted and
unencrypted traffic
• New habits: Users doing more types of tasks online – shopping,
research, news, collaboration, finances, socializing, medical
diagnostics, and more
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The Nature of Network Traffic
Solution Alternatives
The de-facto network standard is the TCP/IP protocol suite, and over 80
percent of TCP/IP traffic is TCP. Although TCP offers many advantages
and strengths, management and enforcement of QoS (quality of service)
are not among them.
When faced with bandwidth constraints and unpredictable application
performance, a number of solutions come to mind. This section
addresses the following potential solutions, focusing on their
advantages and limitations:
Many of TCP’s own control or reliability features contribute to
performance problems:
• Management decrees
• TCP retransmits when the network cloud drops packets or delays
acknowledgments
When packets drop or acknowledgements are delayed due to
congested conditions and overflowing router queues, retransmissions
contribute to more traffic and exacerbate the original problem.
• TCP increases bandwidth demands exponentially
With TCP’s slow-start algorithm, senders can iteratively double
the transmission size until packets drop and problems occur. The
algorithm introduces an exponential growth rate and can rapidly
dominate capacity. Without regard for traffic urgency, concurrent
users, or competing applications, TCP simply expands each flow’s
usage until it causes problems. This turns each sizeable traffic flow
into a bandwidth-hungry, potentially destructive consumer that could
undermine equitable or appropriate allocation of network resources.
• TCP imposes network overload
TCP expands allocation until packets are dropped or responses are
delayed. It floods routers by design!
As large amounts of data are forwarded to routers, more congestion
forms, bigger queues form, more delay is introduced, more packets are
discarded, more timeouts occur, more retransmissions are sent, more
congestion forms…and the cyclical spiral continues.
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
INTERNET ACCESS LINK AND
APPLICATION TRAFFIC
©
BLUE COAT SYSTEMS, INC
When demand rises and large packet bursts set this domino effect in
motion, all traffic experiences delays – large or small, interactive or
batch, urgent or frivolous. But critical or urgent applications (SAP or
web conferencing, for example) suffer the most. User experience will
degrade. Productivity deteriorates. Business declines.
• Additional bandwidth and compression
• Packet marking and MPLS
• Queuing-only schemes on routers or other networking equipment
• Blue Coat’s application traffic management
Management Decrees
A university says, “Don’t use P2P applications.” Or a corporation says,
“Don’t watch YouTube videos in your office.” Managerial edicts are only
as effective as an organization’s ability to enforce them. In addition, this
approach only impacts the network load that is due to unsanctioned
traffic. It does nothing to manage concurrent file transfers, cloud
applications, large email attachments, Citrix-based applications, print
traffic, and all the other traffic that is both necessary and important.
Real-world traffic has an incredible variety of requirements that
complicates the task of enforcing appropriate performance for all.
Additional Bandwidth and Compression
When performance problems occur, a common response to network
congestion is buying more bandwidth. But an upgrade is not an
effective solution. Too often, network managers spend large portions of
their limited budgets on bandwidth upgrades in an attempt to resolve
performance problems, only to find that the additional bandwidth is
quickly consumed by recreational traffic and performance problem of
their critical business applications persist. Quite often, critical and poorly
performing applications aren’t necessarily the applications that gain
access to extra capacity. Usually, it’s less urgent, bandwidth-intensive
applications that monopolize the added resources.
In this illustration, more bandwidth is added, but the beneficiaries are
top bandwidth consumers (web browsing, email, music downloads)
instead of the most critical applications (Oracle, Citrix, TN3270). If usage
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patterns perpetuate after a bandwidth upgrade (as they usually do),
critical applications will continue to lose out to the more aggressive and
less important traffic.
• Routers manage bandwidth passively, discarding packets and
providing no direct feedback to end systems. Routers use queuing
(buffering and waiting) or packet tossing to control traffic sources and
their rates.
• Queues, by their definition, oblige traffic to wait in lines and add
delay to transaction time. Dropping packets is even worse for TCP
applications since it forces the application to wait for a timeout and
then retransmit.
• Queues do not proactively control the rate at which traffic enters the
wide-area network at the other edge of a connection.
• Queuing-based solutions are not bi-directional and do not control the
rate at which traffic travels from a WAN to a LAN, where there is no
queue.
Bandwidth upgrades impose setup costs and increased ongoing
operating costs. In some places, especially in remote locations, larger
pipes are not available or are extremely expensive. Even if bandwidth
costs drop, they remain a recurring monthly cost. According to the
Gartner Group “The WAN represents the single largest recurring cost,
other than people, in IS organizations.”
The same challenge exists when organizations turn to compressiononly solutions that lack application-aware and control features. Without
proper identification and management, compression’s bandwidth gains
will most likely enhance the wrong applications.
Queuing-Only Schemes on Routers or other Networking Equipment
Routers provide queuing technology that buffers waiting packets on a
congested network. A variety of queuing schemes, including weighted
fair queuing, priority output queuing, and custom queuing, attempt to
prioritize and distribute bandwidth to individual data flows so that lowvolume applications don’t get overtaken by large transfers.
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
INTERNET ACCESS LINK AND
APPLICATION TRAFFIC
©
BLUE COAT SYSTEMS, INC
Router-based, queuing-only solutions have improved. For example,
they can now enforce per traffic type aggregate bandwidth rates for any
traffic type they can differentiate. But a variety of router and queuing
limitations remain:
• Routers can’t enforce per-flow minimum or maximum bandwidth rates.
• Routers don’t allow traffic to expand beyond bandwidth limits when
congestion and competing traffic are not issues.
• Routers don’t enable distinct strategies for high-speed and low-speed
connections.
• Routers don’t allow for a maximum number of allowed flows for a
given traffic type or a given sender to be specified.
• Queuing addresses a problem only after congestion has occurred. It’s
an after-the-fact approach to a real-time problem.
• Queuing schemes can be difficult to configure.
• Routers don’t have the ability to assess the performance their queuing
delivers.
• Traffic classification is too coarse and overly dependent on port
matching and IP addresses. Routers can’t automatically detect and
identify many applications as they pass. They can’t identify non-IP
traffic, much VoIP traffic, peer-to-peer traffic, games, HTTP on nonstandard ports, non-HTTP traffic on port 80, and other types of traffic.
Their inability to distinguish traffic severely limits their ability to control
it appropriately.
Queuing is a good tactic, and one that should be incorporated into any
reasonable performance solution. But stand alone, it is not an effective
solution. Although routers don’t identify large numbers of traffic types
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or enforce a variety of flexible allocation strategies, a strong case could
be made that they shouldn’t. The first and primary function of a router is
to route. Similarly, although a router has some traffic-blocking features,
it doesn’t function as a complete firewall. And it shouldn’t. It needs to
focus its processing power on prompt, efficient routing responsibilities.
Packet Marking
Packet marking is another popular method that ensures speedy
treatment across the WAN and across heterogeneous network devices.
A variety of standards have evolved over time. First, CoS/ToS (class and
type of service bits) were incorporated into IP. Then, Diffserv became the
newer marking protocol for uniform quality of service (QoS), essentially
the same as ToS bits, just more of them. MPLS is another standard that
integrates the ability to specify a network path with class of service for
consistent QoS.
The advantages of packet marking are clear. It is proactive and does
not wait until a problem occurs before taking action. It is an industrystandard system that different equipment from different vendors all
incorporate, ensuring consistent treatment. But, as with queuing, it
doesn’t stand alone as an effective solution, as it:
• Needs assistance to differentiate types of traffic/applications so that
the proper distinguishing markers can be applied
With PacketShaper, you can:
• Protect the performance of important applications, such as SAP
and Oracle
• Prioritize and protect important Cloud/SaaS applications such as
Office 365 and SalesForce.com
• Contain unsanctioned and recreational traffic, such as YouTube and
Facebook
• Provision steady streams for real-time applications such as voice or
video traffic to ensure optimized user experience
• Stop undesirable applications or users from monopolizing the link
• Reserve or cap bandwidth using an explicit rate, percentage of
capacity, or priority
• Cannot apply explicit bandwidth minimums and maximums
• Detect attacks and limit their impact
• Doesn’t control the number of allowed flows for a given type of traffic
or a given sender
• Balance applications, such as Microsoft® Exchange, that are
both bandwidth-hungry and critically important, to deliver prompt
performance with minimal impact
With assistance, packet marking can contribute to excellent
performance control.
©
PacketShaper offers a broad spectrum of tools and technologies to
control performance. They include explicit bits-per-second minimum
and maximum bandwidth rates, relative priorities, the ability to precisely
target the right traffic, both inbound and outbound control, and features
to address the deficits listed in the sections on queuing and packet
marking, making them into complete performance solutions. Together,
these and other capabilities form the PacketShaper’s application traffic
management system.
• Lacks control over the rate at which packets enter the WAN
• Needs another solution to detect low- and high-speed connections,
although it can then implement appropriate treatment for each
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
INTERNET ACCESS LINK AND
APPLICATION TRAFFIC
Blue Coat’s Application Traffic Management
• Allow immediate passage for small, delay-sensitive traffic such
as Telnet
• Provision bandwidth equitably between multiple locations, groups,
or users
• Monitor conditions of interest, then, when thresholds are crossed,
automatically take action to correct, document, and/or notify someone
of the problem
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example, you can control the subset of traffic that matches: Oracle
running on Citrix MetaFrame with an MPLS path label of 5 destined for
the London office.
Per-Class Limits and/or Reservations
Your network probably supports several applications that might be
important, but are not urgently time sensitive. As explained earlier in
“The Nature of Network Traffic,” when these applications exhibit bursty,
bandwidth-greedy behavior, trouble starts. Bandwidth-starved, critical
applications suffer sluggish performance and become the losers in the
fight for bandwidth in bottlenecks at WAN or Internet links.
Graphs comparing usage and
efficiency, before and after using
features in PacketShaper.
PacketShaper
Classifies and Manages
Traffic by Type
WebPulse Classification
Service Updates
Traffic Types
Controlled Passage
PacketShaper includes features to specify bandwidth maximums and/or
minimums to one or a group of applications, sessions, users, locations,
streams, and other traffic subsets. The PacketShaper divides your
network traffic into classes. By default, it categorizes passing traffic into
a separate class for each application, service, or protocol, but you can
specify a lot of other criteria to separate traffic by whatever scheme you
deem as appropriate.
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
INTERNET ACCESS LINK AND
APPLICATION TRAFFIC
©
BLUE COAT SYSTEMS, INC
Traffic classes are extremely important, because the PacketShaper
applies control on a class-by-class basis. The PacketShaper can also
apply its control features to other subsets of traffic besides classes,
such as each user’s traffic or each session’s traffic. The traffic class is
your most powerful tool to target your control strategies to the precise
traffic you want without influencing the traffic you don’t want. For
Assure Voice & Video
Classroom Delivery
WAN
Protect Education Cloud
Contain Recreational
Fairly Allocate Guest Users
A PacketShaper partition creates a virtual separate pipe for a traffic class.
A partition is appropriate when you want to limit a greedy application or
when you want to protect a vulnerable but critical application. It contains
or protects (or both) all traffic in one class as a whole.
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PARTITION USAGE EXAMPLES
PROBLEM
SOLUTION
BEHAVIOR
SAP performance at a T1 bench office is terrible.
Partition size = 250Kbps; burstable; limit–none
If SAP is active, it gets bandwidth, period. No matter
how much other traffic is also active, SAP gets all the
bandwidth it needs – up to 250 Kbps.
A partition on SAP traffic reserves about a sixth of the
link for SAP and allows SAP to use the whole link it is
available.
BYOD usage generates huge amount of traffic for
WAN and Internet connections. In addition to content
consumptions, OS and application downloads/
updates (e.g. 2GB iOS8 upgrade) create huge traffic
spikes that can easily overwhelm enterprise networks.
Partition size = 50Kpbs; priority = 0;
burstable; limit = 5%
Recreational video and audio streaming can
sometimes swamp a company’s network. Although
wanting to avoid an outright ban, management
doesn’t want employees depending on the company
network for abundant speedy streams.
Partition size = 0; burstable; limit = 5%
Microsoft Exchange is vitally important to an
organization and needs definite bandwidth to
work effectively. However, the organization’s other
applications are suffering as Exchange can tend
toward bandwidth-greedy habits.
Partition size = 25%; burstable; limit = 65%
A partition on mobile OS (iOS, Android) traffic with
acceptable bandwidth reserve and allows bursting
of up to 5% of capacity when extra bandwidth is
available.
A partition on streaming media traffic reserves no
bandwidth but allows streaming to take up to 5
percent of capacity.
A partition on Exchange traffic both contains and
protects.
If SAP needs more than 250 Kbps, it gets a pro-rated
share of other available bandwidth. If SAP needs less
than 250 Kbps, it loans the unused portion to other
applications.
When more important traffic needs bandwidth,
mobile OS updating is limited to 50Kbps. When no
other higher priority traffic is present, iOS or Andriod
updates can burst, but take no more than 5 percent
of total network capacity.
When more important traffic needs bandwidth,
recreational streaming media gets none. Even when
there are no other takers, streaming can access only
5 percent of capacity.
Exchange always performs adequately because
it always has access to 25 percent of capacity no
matter what other traffic is present. If Exchange
needs more, it gets a pro-rated share of remaining
bandwidth – up to 65 percent of capacity. Exchange
never takes over the network.
If Exchange needs less than 25 percent, it loans the
unused portion to other applications.
You specify the size of a partition’s private link, designate whether it can
expand or burst, and optionally cap its growth. You can define partitions
using explicit bandwidth rates or percentages of capacity. Partitions
do not waste bandwidth, as they always share their unused excess
bandwidth with other traffic.
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
INTERNET ACCESS LINK AND
APPLICATION TRAFFIC
©
BLUE COAT SYSTEMS, INC
As traffic flows, the PacketShaper allocates bandwidth for partitions’
minimum sizes and other bandwidth guarantees first. After that,
remaining bandwidth is divided up. If allowed to burst, a partition gets a
pro-rated share of this remaining bandwidth, subject to the partition limit
and the traffic’s priority (indicated in policies, coming later).
Variations on the Partition Theme
Two variations on the partition theme are of particular interest:
hierarchical partitions and dynamic partitions. Hierarchical partitions are
embedded in larger, parent partitions. They enable you to carve a large
bandwidth allotment into managed subsets. For example, you could
reserve 40 percent of your link capacity for applications running over
Citrix, and then reserve portions of that 40 percent for each application
running over Citrix – perhaps half for Oracle and a quarter each for Great
Plains and Sales Logix.
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Dynamic partitions are per-user partitions that manage each user’s
bandwidth allocation across one or more applications. In addition,
dynamic partitions can be created for a group of users within an IP
address range.
Per-Session Rate Policies
Many applications need to be managed on a flow-by-flow basis rather
than as a combined whole. Per-session control enables many benefits.
Control policies:
• Time connections’ exchanges to minimize time-outs and
retransmissions and maximize throughput
• Prevent a single session or user from monopolizing bandwidth
• Allocate precisely the rate that streaming traffic needs to avoid jitter
and ensure good reception
Rate policies can deliver a minimum rate for each individual session
of a traffic class, allow that session prioritized access to excess
bandwidth, and set a limit on the total bandwidth the session can use.
A policy can keep greedy traffic in line or can protect latency-sensitive
sessions by providing the minimum bandwidth or priorities they need.
As with partitions, any unused bandwidth is automatically lent to other
applications.
Dynamic partitions are useful for situations when you care more about
equitable bandwidth allocation than about how it’s put to use (such
as in a guest Wi-Fi network). Dynamic partitions are created as users
initiate traffic of a given class. When the maximum number of dynamic
partitions is reached, an inactive slot (if there is one) is released for each
new active user. Otherwise, you choose whether latecomers are refused
or squeezed into an overflow area. Dynamic partitions greatly simplify
administrative overhead and allow over-subscription.
For example, a university can give each dormitory student a minimum
of 20 Kbps and a maximum of 60 Kbps to use in any way the student
wishes. Or a business can protect and/or cap bandwidth for distinct
departments (accounting, human resources, marketing, and so on).
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
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APPLICATION TRAFFIC
©
BLUE COAT SYSTEMS, INC
As always, the PacketShaper lends any unused bandwidth to others
in need.
For example, VoIP (Voice over IP) can be a convenient and costsaving option, but only if it consistently delivers good service and user
experience. When delay-sensitive voice traffic traverses congested WAN
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links on a shared network, it can encounter delay, jitter or packet loss
which results in poor voice quality. Each flow requires a guaranteed
minimum rate or the service is unusable. After all, a voice stream that
randomly speeds up and slows down as packets arrive in clumps is not
likely to attain wide commercial acceptance. Voice traffic needs a persession guarantee to ensure good reception.
All types of streaming media (such as distance learning, NetMeeting,
Flash, QuickTime, StreamWorks, SHOUTcast, WindowsMedia, and
WebEx) can benefit from rate policies with per session minimums to
secure good performance. Many thin-client or server-based applications
also benefit from per-session minimums to ensure smooth performance.
Print traffic, emails with large attachments, and file transfers are all
examples of bandwidth-greedy traffic that would benefit from rate
policies, but without a guaranteed minimum, with a lower priority than
that for critical traffic, and optionally with a bandwidth limit.
To see how a per-session bandwidth limit might be useful, consider
an organization with abundant file transfers. Although necessary and
important, the file transfers aren’t urgent and do tend to overtake all
capacity.
Before and after effects on recreational
traffic’s bandwidth usage after using
PacketShaper’s rate policies and
partitions on select applications.
Now suppose someone who is equipped with a T3 initiates a file
transfer. Assume a partition is in place and keeps the aggregate total of
all transfer traffic in line. The one high-capacity user could dominate the
entire FTP partition, leaving other potential FTP users without resources.
Because a partition applies only to the aggregate total of a traffic class,
individual users would still be in a free-for-all situation. A rate policy that
caps each FTP session at 100 Kbps, or any appropriate amount, would
keep downloads equitable.
Admission Control
What happens when so many users swamp a service that it can’t
accommodate the number and maintain good performance? Without a
PacketShaper, performance would degrade for everyone. What options
are there? You could:
• Deny access to the service once existing users consume all available
resources
• Keep latecomers waiting for the next available slot with just enough
bandwidth to string them along
• For web services, redirect latecomers to an alternate web page
Another handy feature of rate policies – admission control – offers
precisely these three options for services that need a guaranteed rate for
good performance. You can decide how to handle additional sessions
during bandwidth shortages: deny access, squeeze in another user or
for web requests, and redirect the request.
Per-Session Priority Policies
Priority policies allocate bandwidth based on a priority, 0 to 7. Small,
non-bursty, latency-sensitive applications such as telnet are good
candidates for priority policies with a high priority. In contrast, you might
give social media such as YouTube or Facebook a priority of 0 on a
business network so that people can access only if the network is
not busy.
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
INTERNET ACCESS LINK AND
APPLICATION TRAFFIC
©
The following table of priorities offers guidelines only. Of course,
different applications are of varying urgencies in different environments,
so tailor these suggestions to match your own requirements.
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PRIORITY
7
6
5
4
DESCRIPTION
Mission-critical, urgent, important, time-sensitive, interactive, transaction-based. Examples might include SAP, Oracle, and a sales website.
Important, needed, less time-sensitive. Examples might include collaboration and messaging systems, such as Microsoft Exchange.
3
Standard service, default, not usually important or unimportant. Examples might include web browsing.
2
Needed, but low-urgency or large file size. Examples might include FTP downloads and large email attachments.
1
0
Marginal traffic with little or no business importance. Examples might include YouTube, mobile OS updates, music streaming, Internet radio and games.
Other Per-Session Policies
PacketShaper offers several other policies in addition to rate and priority policies. They include:
POLICY TYPE
POLICY DESCRIPTION
USAGE EXAMPLES
DISCARD
POLICIES
Discard policies intentionally block traffic. The packets are simply
tossed and no feedback is sent back to the sender.
Discard traffic from websites with questionable content. Block
attempts to Telnet into your site. Block external FTP requests to your
internal FTP server.
NEVER-ADMIT
POLICIES
Never-Admit policies are similar to discard policies except that the
policy informs the sender of the block.
Redirect music enthusiasts to a web page explaining that streaming
audio is allowed only between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.
IGNORE
POLICIES
Ignore policies simply pass traffic on, not applying any bandwidth
management at all.
Let any traffic pass unmanaged that is going to a destination that is
not on the other side of the managed WAN access link.
TCP Rate Control
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PacketShaper’s patented TCP Rate Control works behind the scenes
for all traffic with rate policies, optimizing a limited-capacity link. It
overcomes TCP’s shortcomings, proactively preventing congestion
on both inbound and outbound traffic. TCP Rate Control paces traffic,
telling the end stations to slow down or speed up. It’s no use sending
packets any faster if they will be accepted only at a particular rate once
they arrive. Rather than discarding packets from a congested queue,
TCP Rate Control paces the incoming packets to prevent congestion. It
forces a smooth, even flow rate that maximizes throughput.
TCP Rate Control detects real-time flow speed, forecasts packet-arrival
times, meters acknowledgments going back to the sender, and modifies
the advertised window sizes sent to the sender. Just as a router
manipulates a packet’s header information to influence the packet’s
direction, PacketShaper manipulates a packet’s header information to
influence the packet’s rate.
Imagine putting fine sand through a straw or small pipe. Sand passes
through the straw evenly and quickly. Now imagine putting chunky
gravel through the same straw. The gravel gets stuck and arrives in
clumps. PacketShaper conditions traffic so that it becomes more like
sand than gravel. These smoothly controlled connections are much less
likely to incur packet loss, and more importantly, it delivers a smooth
and consistent user experience.
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UDP Rate Control and Queuing
Unlike TCP, UDP sends data to a recipient without establishing a
connection and does not attempt to verify that the data arrived intact.
Therefore, UDP is referred to as a best-effort, connectionless protocol.
The services that UDP provides are minimal – port number multiplexing
and an optional checksum error-checking process – so UDP uses less
time, bandwidth, and processing over-head than TCP.
While UDP doesn’t offer a high level of error recovery, it still has appeal
for certain types of operations. UDP is used mostly by applications that
require fast delivery and are not concerned with reliability – DNS, for
example. Some UDP applications, such as RealAudio and VoIP, generate
persistent, session-oriented traffic. Whenever an application uses UDP
for transport, the application must take responsibility for managing the
end-to-end connection, handling packet retransmission and other flowcontrol services native to TCP.
Because UDP doesn’t manage the end-to-end connection, it doesn’t get
feedback regarding real-time conditions, and it can’t prevent or adapt to
congestion. Therefore, UDP can end up contributing significantly to an
overabundance of traffic, impacting all protocols – UDP, TCP, and non-IP
included. In addition, latency-sensitive flows, such as VoIP, can be so
delayed rendering it to be useless.
UDP Control Mechanisms
PacketShaper combines techniques in rate control and queuing to
deliver control over performance to UDP traffic.
PacketShaper is very effective in controlling outbound UDP traffic. When
a client requests data from a server, the PacketShaper intervenes and
paces the flow of outbound data, regulating the flow of UDP packets
before they traverse the congested access link. It can speed urgent UDP
traffic or give streams steady access.
EFFECTIVELY MANAGING WAN,
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Management of inbound traffic presents a bigger challenge. By the time
inbound UDP traffic reaches a PacketShaper, it already has crossed the
expensive, congested access link, and PacketShaper cannot directly
control the link rate. However, PacketShaper can control the inbound
UDP traffic rate to the destination host.
The PacketShaper queues incoming UDP packets on a flow-by-flow
basis when they are not scheduled for immediate transfer, based on
priority and competing traffic. PacketShaper’s UDP queues implement
an important and helpful addition: UDP delay bound. The delay bound
defines how long packets can remain buffered before they become too
old to be useful. For example, a delay bound of 200ms is appropriate
for a streaming audio flow. The delay bound helps avoid retransmissions
from holding traffic too long.
Either priority or rate policies are appropriate for UDP traffic classes,
depending on the traffic and its goals:
• A priority policy is best for UDP traffic that is transaction oriented
• A rate policy is best for persistent UDP traffic (such as streaming
media) because its guaranteed bits-per-second option can ensure a
minimum rate for each UDP flow.
Many of the PacketShaper’s other control mechanisms are also
appropriate for UDP traffic. UDP traffic management is part of a
comprehensive strategy to manage the bandwidth and performance of
many types of traffic and applications using PacketShaper’s different
control features.
Packet Marking for MPLS and ToS
As discussed earlier, packet marking is a growing trend to ensure
speedy treatment across the WAN and across heterogeneous network
devices. CoS, ToS, and Diffserv technologies evolved to boost QoS.
Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a popular standard for
integrating the ability to specify a network path with class of service for
consistent QoS. Network convergence of voice, video, and data have
spurred interest in MPLS, with the goal of having one network that can
support appropriate paths for each service. MPLS is a standards-based
technology to improve network performance for select traffic. Traffic
normally takes a variety of paths from point A to point B, depending
upon each router’s decisions on the appropriate next hop. With MPLS,
you define specific paths for specific traffic, identified by a label put in
each packet.
The PacketShaper can classify, mark, and remark traffic based on
IP CoS/ToS bits, Diffserv settings, and MPLS labels, allowing traffic
types to have uniform end-to-end treatment by multivendor devices.
By attending to marking and remarking, the PacketShaper can act as
a type of universal translator, detecting intentions in one protocol and
perpetuating those intentions with a different protocol as it forwards
the packets.
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Enhance MPLS Performance
MPLS has become a leading vehicle for connecting an organization’s
distributed locations. Most organizations adopt MPLS to take advantage
of different classes of service and ensure appropriate application
performance.
Effects on bandwidth usage by
recreational traffic after using
rate policies and partitions on
selected applications.
However, once MPLS is implemented, business organizations frequently
discover that placing key applications into premium service classes
does not reap the expected benefits. Why? An MPLS solution degrades
as it faces three major challenges:
• The right traffic does not get placed in the right MPLS service class.
Premium classes deliver sub-premium performance as they drown
in copious non-urgent traffic; important applications are improperly
assigned to only best-effort classes.
• Traffic gets hung up in a congested bottleneck just before each entry
point to the provider’s MPLS network. In addition, unmanaged traffic
heading into a LAN (inbound) grows unruly, using an inappropriately
high flow rate.
• Organizations need information on the performance of each
application and each service class transported over their MPLS
network. Concrete, quantified service-level assessments are rare.
The PacketShaper complements MPLS installations and overcomes
each of the challenges listed above as it:
• Detects, identifies, and classifies diverse applications, assigning
distinct QoS tags. The PacketShaper can mark traffic with MPLS
labels directly or can mark traffic with Diffserv tags that relay serviceclass intentions to the first router within the MPLS cloud.
• Ensures that the traffic within a particular MPLS service class is
the right traffic, meant for that class. PacketShaper’s powerful and
granular application classification ensures accurate and appropriate
MPLS service-class assignments.
• Eases the bottlenecks that form at the entry points to MPLS networks
with control features and rate control.
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• Extends MPLS performance benefits to the network edge and users’
premises.
• Measures and graphs per application and per-MPLS-class
performance, enabling assessment of service-level agreement (SLA)
compliance.
Incidentally, the PacketShaper offers similar features for VLANs that
it does for MPLS – classifying traffic by VLAN; pushing, popping, and
swapping VLAN identifiers and priorities; and putting each VLAN’s traffic
on the right path to its destination.
Scheduling
Sometimes organizations need different control strategies at different
times or for different days. For example:
• A middle school prohibits instant messaging during class hours but
allows it during lunch or after school.
• A company’s network administrator blocks games and YouTube video
on weekdays, but allows them on weekends.
• A sales-ordering application gets twice its usual bandwidth in the
last two days of the month because the sales personnel typically
deliver the most orders right before each monthly deadline. With
PacketShaper’s scheduling features, you can control performance
differently at different times. You can vary your configuration details
based on the day or the time of day. The choice of day can be daily,
weekends, weekdays, specific dates, specific days of the week, and/
or specific dates of the month.
Adaptive and Automated Control Strategies
Most people don’t want to be caught unaware by significant network or
application events. Automatic problem detection and notification help,
however, problems still remain problems even if someone is notified.
The addition of automatic problem resolution really makes a compelling
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difference. With automated correction, you don’t even have to know
about the occurrence of a problem in order to fix it, or at least address it
temporarily.
PacketShaper’s Adaptive Response feature automatically monitors for
conditions of interest. Once found, it can perform any corrective actions
you request ahead of time for that problem. Adaptive Response uses
features in the PacketShaper to detect the conditions, and to take
corrective actions, or to notify. For example, suppose you support SAP
on your network, and it’s one of your most critical applications. You have
an MPLS WAN core providing four MPLS classes of service. You already
deployed PacketShapers to collaborate with MPLS for a more complete
QoS solution. You decided to put SAP in the third service class, and
the PacketShaper is dutifully marking SAP’s traffic appropriately. You
defined a partition for SAP traffic with a minimum size of 15 percent
of capacity. In addition, you defined a service-level goal that at least
92 percent of SAP transactions should complete within one and a half
seconds.
Everything sounds great. Now, what happens when performance takes a
nosedive? Even worse, how about at 4:00 a.m.?
Even without PacketShaper’s adaptive response feature, you are still in
good shape — assuming you are available at 4:00 a.m. PacketShaper’s
report on response times and service-level compliance highlights the
problem, while other reports help diagnose the cause (perhaps FTP
bursts, for example). You adjust your partitions and policies’ definitions
to solve the problem. You might, for example, create a partition with
a maximum for FTP, change FTP’s MPLS service class, and bump
SAP’s minimum partition size to 18 percent of capacity. If you were not
available, then SAP users would continue to suffer until you arrived to
correct the problem.
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With adaptive response, your day is different. You receive an email
at 4:00 a.m. saying SAP experienced slow performance, and the
PacketShaper has taken steps to mitigate the problem until you can
investigate the root cause. Until then, SAP users are happy. To get this
type of assistance, you configure the adaptive response feature ahead
of time, when you initially configure SAP’s partition and assign its MPLS
service class. You define an adaptive response agent to protect SAP’s
performance more stringently when SAP’s service-level compliance
dips. More specifically, you define an adaptive response agent with the
following values:
• Condition or metric to monitor
SAP scenario example: Monitor the service-level compliance metric
(service-level %) for the SAP traffic class
• Threshold that indicates a problem
SAP scenario example: Specify 92 percent as the percentage of
SAP transactions that must complete promptly in order for SAP
performance to be considered in good shape
• Frequency to check the metric or condition
SAP scenario example: Check performance every two minutes
• If automatic corrective actions are needed, and, if so, which
actions any PacketShaper CLI (command-line interface)
command with any parameters
SAP scenario example: Yes, corrective actions are needed. Create a
red action file (executed when the problematic threshold is crossed)
that contains CLI commands to:
›› Change the SAP partition’s minimum size to 25 percent
›› Bump SAP’s MPLS class of service to the highest of the four
options
›› If notification is needed, and, if so, which method (email, a Syslog
server message, or an SNMP trap)
SAP scenario example: Yes, notification is needed. Send an email to
yourself stating the percentage of slow SAP transactions and what
measures were taken automatically as a stopgap. With this adaptive
response configuration in place, you could even get to work late
following the 4:00 a.m. mishap and still not be greeted with cranky,
frustrated users and urgent service requests.
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Putting Control Features to Use
Importance
You’ve seen a variety of mechanisms to control traffic and its
performance. But discussions of tools, no matter how powerful, aren’t
really interesting until you put them to use and see their value. That’s
what we’ll do in this section.
Sometimes the same application can be crucial to one organization’s
function and just irritating noise on another’s network.
Characterizing Traffic
Managing bandwidth allocation for today’s traffic diversity is a definite
challenge. Network traffic and applications do not share the same
characteristics or requirements. We don’t have the same performance
expectations for all traffic. Therefore, before choosing a control strategy,
you must first characterize your goals and traffic.
First, consider whether your primary concern is application performance
or traffic load. Typically, if you are concerned with keeping customers
or employees productive, then you are concerned about application
performance. But if you supply bandwidth to users or organizations, and
you are not involved with the applications that run over that bandwidth,
then you are concerned about capacity and traffic volume.
• Real Audio to a non-related
business
• Quake to a provider of gaming
services
• PeopleSoft to a support
organization
• Games in a business context
• Instant messaging in a classroom
• Email to a business
Time Sensitivity
Some traffic, although important, is not particularly time sensitive. For
example, for most organizations, print traffic is an important part of
business. But employees and productivity will probably not be impacted
if a print job takes another few seconds to make its way to the printer.
In contrast, any critical application that leaves a user poised on top of
the Enter key waiting for a response is definitely time sensitive.
• An enterprise providing applications
to staff
• A service that offers contracted
amounts of bandwidth to
businesses or individuals
Ask yourself: Is the traffic interactive or particularly latency
sensitive?
• A university that supplies each
dormitory room with an equitable
portion of bandwidth
If your primary concern is load rather than performance, then skip ahead
to Suggestions and Examples.
A good initial approach to managing performance is to manage two
traffic categories proactively: traffic that needs to have its performance
protected, and traffic that tends to swell to take an unwarranted amount
of capacity.
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NOT IMPORTANT
• SAP to a manufacturing business
EXAMPLES WHERE LOAD IS
FOREMOST
• A business using B2B or B2C
applications to conduct commerce
©
IMPORTANT
EXAMPLES WHERE
PERFORMANCE IS FOREMOST
• A service provider offering managed
applications services to subscribers
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Ask yourself: Is the traffic critical to organizational success?
TIME SENSITIVE
NOT TIME SENSITIVE
•Telnet
•Print
• Citrix-based, interactive application
•Email
•Oracle
• File transfers
• VoIP, Web Conferencing, online
training
For important and time-sensitive traffic, consider using a high priority
in a priority policy (for small flows) or in a rate policy (for other flows).
Consider a partition with a minimum size.
For each type of traffic you want to manage, consider its behavior with
respect to four characteristics: importance, time sensitivity, size, and
jitter. Each characteristic below has an associated explanation and
question to ask yourself, as well as several examples.
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Size
Jitter
A traffic session that tends to swell to use increasing amounts of
bandwidth and produces large surges of packets is said to be “bursty.”
TCP’s slow start algorithm creates or exacerbates traffic’s tendency to
burst. As TCP attempts to address the sudden demand of a bursting
connection, congestion and retransmissions occur.
An application that is played (video or audio) as it arrives at its network
destination is said to stream. A streaming application needs a minimum
bits-per-second rate to deliver smooth and satisfactory performance.
Streaming media that arrives with stutter and static is not likely to
gain many fans. On the other hand, too many fans can undermine
performance for everyone, including users of other types of applications.
Applications such as FTP, multimedia components of HTTP traffic, print,
and video streaming are considered bursty since they generate large
amounts of download data.
Users’ expectations for this traffic depend on the context. For example,
if a large multimedia file is being downloaded for later use, the user may
not require high speed as much as steady progress and the assurance
that the download won’t have to be restarted.
Ask yourself: Are flows large and bandwidth hungry, expanding to
consume all available bandwidth?
LARGE AND BURSTY
SMALL AND NOT BURSTY
• Video streaming
• Telnet
• Email with large attachments
• ICMP
• Print
• TN3270
Ask yourself: Does the traffic require smooth consistent delivery or it
loses value?
PRONE TO JITTER
NOT PRONE TO JITTER
•VoIP
•Email
•WindowsMedia
•Print
• Real Audio
• MS SQL
• Distance-learning applications
•AppleTalk
For jitter-prone traffic, especially if it is also important, consider a rate
policy with a per-session guarantee. If too many users might swamp a
service, use a partition with a limit and admission control features.
For large and bursty traffic, consider a partition with a limit. If the bursty
traffic is important, consider a partition with both a minimum and a
maximum size. Consider a rate policy with a per-session limit if you
are concerned that one high-capacity user might impact others using
the same application. Consider a policy with a low or medium priority,
depending on importance.
For small, non-bursty flows, consider a priority policy. Use a high priority
if the small flow is important.
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Suggestions and Examples
The following table lists a few common traffic types, their characteristics, typical behavior, desired behavior, and control configuration suggestions.
TRAFFIC
TYPES
IMPORTANT
TIME
SENSITIVITY
SIZEABLE/
BURSTY
JITTER
PRONE
FTP
√
WEB
BROWSING
Varies
√
√
√
WEB-BASED
APPLICATIONS
√
√
TELNET
√
√
MUSIC
DOWNLOADS
IN A BUSINESS
ENVIRONMENT
√
SAP
A CONTRACTED
AMOUNT OF
BANDWIDTH
VOICE OVER IP
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√
√
Don’t care
Don’t care
Don’t care
Don’t
care
USUAL UNDESIRED
BEHAVIOR
DESIRED
BEHAVIOR
CONFIGURATION
SUGGESTIONS
Stuck progress
indicators; peaks clog
WAN access, slowing
more time-sensitive
applications
No stalled sessions;
sustained download
progress; paced bursts
Rate policy with 0 guaranteed,
burstable, medium priority;
Partition to contain the
aggregate of all traffic
Unpredictable dis- play
and delay times
Prompt, consistent
display
Rate policy with 0 guaranteed,
burstable, medium priority,
optional per-session cap
Insufficient and/or
inconsistent response
times
Prompt, consistent
response
Rate policy with optional persession guarantee, burstable,
high priority, optional persession cap; Consider a
partition with a min size to
protect the application
Slow, inconsistent
performance
Immediate transfer for
prompt response times;
small size won’t impact
others
Priority policy with a high
priority
Bursts and abundant
downloads clog WAN
access and undermine
time-sensitive
applications
Contained down- loads
using a small portion
(or none) of network
resources
Rate policy with 0 guaranteed,
burstable, priority 0; Partition
to contain the aggregate of all
users to less than 5 percent of
capacity (or as desired)
Slow and unpredictable
response times
Swift, consistent
performance
Rate policy with 0 guaranteed,
burstable, high priority;
Partition with a min size to
protect all SAP traffic
Some users claim more
than their fair share and
others are shorted
They get what they pay
for
Dynamic partition to allocate
each user’s or each subnet’s
bandwidth equitably
Dynamic partition to allocate each user’s or each subnet’s bandwidth
For More Information
The Blue Coat PacketShaper helps enterprises to control bandwidth costs, deliver a superior user experience and align network resources with
business priorities. In summary, PacketShaper offers application level visibility and policy-based bandwidth allocation to boost or curb application
performance over the WAN and Internet. Learn more about PacketShaper on our website at bluecoat.com/products/packetshaper.
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APPENDIX A
How TCP Rate Control Works
TCP Review
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides connection-oriented
services for the protocol suite’s application layer – that is, a client and
a server must establish a connection to exchange data. TCP transmits
data in segments encased in IP datagrams, along with checksums, used
to detect data corruption, and sequence numbers to ensure an ordered
byte stream. TCP is considered to be a reliable transport mechanism
because it requires the receiving computer to acknowledge not only the
receipt of data but also its completeness and sequence. If the sending
computer doesn’t receive notification from the receiving computer
within an expected time frame, the sender times out and retransmits
the segment.
TCP uses a sliding-window flow-control mechanism to control
throughput over wide-area networks. As the receiver acknowledges
initial receipt of data, it advertises how much data it can handle,
called its window size. The sender can transmit multiple packets,
up to the recipient’s window size, before it stops and waits
for an acknowledgment. The sender fills the pipe, waits for an
acknowledgment, and fills the pipe again.
While the receiver typically handles TCP flow control, TCP’s slowstart algorithm is a flow-control mechanism managed by the sender
that is designed to take full advantage of network capacity. When a
connection opens, only one packet is sent until an ACK is received. For
each received ACK, the sender can double the transmission size, within
bounds of the recipient’s window.
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TCP’s congestion-avoidance mechanism attempts to alleviate the
problem of abundant packets filling up router queues. TCP increases
a connection’s transmission rate using the slow-start algorithm until it
senses a problem and then it backs off. It interprets dropped packets
and/or timeouts as signs of congestion. The goal of TCP is for individual
connections to burst on demand to use all available bandwidth, while at
the same time reacting conservatively to inferred problems in order to
alleviate congestion.
TCP Rate Control
Traffic consists of chunks of data that accumulate at access links where
speed conversion occurs. To eliminate the chunks, TCP Rate Control
paces or smoothes the flow by detecting a remote user’s access speed,
factoring in network latency, and correlating this data with other traffic
flow information. Rather than queuing data that passes through the
box and metering it out at the appropriate rate, PacketShaper induces
the sender to send just-in-time data. By changing the traffic chunks, or
bursts, to optimally sized and timed packets, PacketShaper improves
network efficiency, increases throughput, and delivers more consistent,
predictable, and prompt response times.
TCP Rate Control uses three methods to control the rate of
transmissions:
• Detects real-time flow speed
• Meters acknowledgments going back to the sender
• Modifies the advertised window sizes sent to the sender
Just as a router manipulates a packet’s header information to influence
the packet’s direction, PacketShaper manipulates a packet’s header
information to influence the packet’s rate. TCP autobaud is Blue
Coat’s technology that allows appliances to automatically detect
the connection speed of the client or server at the other end of the
connection. This speed-detection mechanism allows PacketShaper to
adapt bandwidth-management strategies even as conditions vary.
PacketShaper incorporates a predictive scheduler that anticipates
bandwidth needs and meters the ACKs and window sizes accordingly.
It uses autobaud, known TCP behaviors, and bandwidth-allocation
policies as predictive criteria.
PacketShaper changes the end-to-end TCP semantics from its
position in the middle of a connection. First, using autobaud, it
determines a connection’s transfer rate to use as a basis on which
to time transmissions. The PacketShaper intercepts a transaction’s
acknowledgment and holds onto it for the amount of time that is
required to smooth the traffic flow and increase throughput without
incurring retransmission timeout. It also supplies a window size that
helps the sender determine when to send the next packet and how
much to send in order to optimize the real-time connection rate.
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Evenly spaced packet transmissions yield significant multiplexing gains
in the network. As packet bursts are eliminated, network utilization can
increase up to 80 percent. Packet spacing also avoids the queuing bias
imposed by weighted fair queuing schemes, which force packet bursts
to the end of a queue, giving preference to low-volume traffic streams.
Thus, sand-like packet transmissions yield increased network utilization
and proceed cleanly through weighted fair queues.
In this packet diagram, PacketShaper intervenes and paces the data
transmission to deliver predictable service.
The following illustration provides an example of the traffic patterns
when natural TCP algorithms are used. Note that the second packet
must be transmitted twice because the sender did not get the
acknowledgement in time that it was received, an unnecessary waste.
Near the bottom, observe the packet burst that occurs. This is quite
typical of TCP’s slow start (but huge later) growth and is what causes
congestion and buffer overflow. The figure on the right provides an
example of the evenly spaced data transmissions that occur when TCP
Rate Control is active. This even spacing not only reduces router queues
but also helps increase the average throughput performance since it
uses more of the bandwidth more of the time.
The sequence described by
the packet diagram includes:
• A data segment is sent to
the receiver.
• The receiver acknowledges
receipt and advertises an
8000-byte window size.
• PacketShaper intercepts
the ACK and determines
that the data must be
transmitted more evenly.
Otherwise, subsequent data
segments will queue up
and packets will be tossed
because insufficient bandwidth is available. In addition, more urgent
and smaller packets from interactive applications would be held
behind the flood of this more bulky data.
• PacketShaper revises the ACK to the sender; the sender immediately
emits data according to the revised window size.
Without PacketShaper: Chunky traffic flow, less throughput, bursty
sporadic transfer, more retransmissions.
With PacketShaper: Smooth traffic flow, more throughput, consistent
transfer rate, fewer retransmissions.
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