Traffic monitoring tool from Dimension Data

Dimension Data

Dimension Data has released a network assessment service that helps organisations review the traffic patterns, flows and volumes they have running across their networks, and improve visibility to accelerate business performance.

Available globally, the Network Optimisation Assessment involves technical interviews, and deploying an appliance on the client’s network for a defined period of time typically seven to 14 days to collect data and a wide variety of information about the network.

Michael Abendanon, Dimension Data South Africa General Manager, Network Integration, says: ‚”In addition to the dramatic growth in traffic volumes on networks, the type of traffic is changing, and the number of networked devices is exploding. This is making high end-to-end performance difficult to achieve, given changes to underlying ICT infrastructure such as mobility, virtualisation, consolidation, and cloud. ‚”With our Network Optimisation Assessment, we’re able to provide clients with a detailed traffic discovery of all voice, video and application traffic flowing over the network, as well as all information relating to protocols, ports, VLANs, traffic direction, and active hosts. Our experts in protocols, networking, data centres and applications provide a detailed report and are able to make recommendations on how network performance can be improved. This is critical as organisations ready their networks for the emerging trends of video, mobility and particularly cloud,‚” says Abendanon.

Cloud computing is the most network-centric computing paradigm and it would simply not be a proposition without a resilient, stable, high performance network underpinning it. According to Cisco’s Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2010 2015 report, Cloud IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 66% between 2010 and 2015. In addition, Cloud IP traffic will account for 30% of organisational data centre traffic by 2015.

Abendanon cites a global shipping company that Dimension Data performed an assessment on: ‚”The client took action on the recommendations and was able to consolidate a significant portion of its branch infrastructure into centralised data centres, with no performance degradation. This resulted in savings for the client across its 200+ branches, while maintaining end user quality of experience when connecting to applications.

‚”The business case for a performance optimisation project is compelling, and the payback period on a typical WAN optimisation project is between four and eighteen months. The Network Optimisation Assessment is a good starting point,‚” he says.

Benefits of the Network Optimisation Assessment

• Provides visibility into and breakdown of existing network traffic patterns

• Provides accurate performance statistics on how the existing network is performing

• Identifies top network resource consumers (users and applications)

• Identifies network performance problems

• Enables more informed network planning, e.g. reviewing the network for voice, video or even cloud computing

• Allows for better selection of performance optimisation and network performance management solutions, e.g. which areas of the network would benefit from WAN optimisation or application delivery?

1. What traffic is currently running across the network?

2. Do I have visibility into the traffic patterns on my network?

3. Do I understand the performance characteristics of my network?

4. Where are my network performance bottlenecks?

5. Are our users experiencing difficulties accessing applications over the network?

6. What network performance problems are we faced with right now?

7. Do I know how much user recreational traffic (low priority web, user video, P2P, etc.) is on our WAN?

8. What applications are we deploying or planning to deploy, and has the access to these applications been fully tested at remote sites and branch offices?

9. Is our network ready for cloud, video, mobility, etc?

10. How often do users complain about poor performance on the network?

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