Can you be sure that new infrastructure investments will pay off in improved performance? Will more bandwidth actually solve your performance issues? Does your current change control process truly ensure that new applications, services and infrastructure are safely introduced into your production environment? Is your infrastructure vendor selection aligned with business needs?
As budgets tighten and investment options increase, infrastructure decisions are getting tougher. It used to be all about adding more bandwidth. But today, network managers have to choose between QoS, WAN acceleration, caching, compression, WAFS, and MPLS solutions from many different vendors making many different claims. So it has become essential to rigorously test any suppositions about new investments in network technology.
To make matters worse, new applications and services are being rolled out across the network with greater frequency – and with little (if any) advance consultation with the network team. But when things start to go wrong in the production environment, that same network team is first to feel the heat. So network managers clearly need a better way to certify and troubleshoot new applications and services before they’re introduced into the production environment.
One of those services in particular, VoIP, is both extremely critical to the business and extremely sensitive to conditions on the network. This is one more reason that network teams need a reliable, controlled test environment in which to validate suppositions about infrastructure and performance. In fact, without adequate network modeling and simulation capabilities, network teams will never be able to strategically and pro-actively manage their environments – and will instead spend all their time fighting fires and fixing problems that could have been prevented with a little due diligence.
Shunra VE addresses these pressing management issues with virtual network technology that delivers a full range of pre-production testing and emulation capabilities. Armed with this technology, network managers can gain a wide range of critical benefits, including:
- Confident infrastructure investment decisions. With a virtual network, you can easily analyze the potential gains from alternative infrastructure investments. You can also make your own highly insightful comparison between different vendors’ solutions. For example, by simply connecting a WAN acceleration device to Shunra VE, you can see first-hand exactly how it will impact performance at your remote offices. So you don’t have rely on vendor claims and third-party lab tests (which may not reflect the specific idiosyncrasies of your environment) alone.
- Confident change control. With Shunra VE, you can fully validate the production-readiness of any new or updated services and applications. Whether you’re upgrading a CRM application or rolling out LDAP, your virtual testing environment will enable you to predict exactly what kind of performance you can expect across all your remote sites and data centers. If you spot a performance bottleneck, you can address it before your production roll-out – instead of after things have already hit the fan. The more effective change control process enabled by Shunra VE also helps you ensure that existing applications and services won’t unexpectedly be disrupted by the introduction of a new one.
- Confident deployment of VoIP and rich media. With Shunra VE, you can be 100% confident that your network is VoIP-ready and/or pinpoint exactly where you need to shore up your infrastructure. In fact, you can accurately model your network and attach phones to your virtual model so that you can hear for yourself exactly how calls will sound once you roll out VoIP into production. You can also continue using Shunra VE after you’ve rolled out VoIP to continuously predict the impact of any new applications or infrastructure changes on VoIP performance – so that you don’t accidentally disrupt critical voice services. Shunra VE will also help you plan for increased VoIP utilization and/or deployment of VoIP to additional remote locations.
- Confident application-centric capacity planning. Want to know if more bandwidth will solve your application performance problem? With Shunra VE, you can test your hypothesis by simply turning up the “bandwidth knob” inside your virtual network. That way, you can avoid spending money on capacity that you don’t really need. In fact, you may even be able to pinpoint places on your network where you can actually reduce bandwidth without impacting end-to-end application performance.
Today’s complex, multi-tier applications and Web services are highly sensitive to even the most subtle network impairments. But, with IT budgets under tight control, few companies can afford to overspend on bandwidth and optimization technologies. That’s why it’s crucial to accurately model and analyze application performance under both existing and proposed enterprise conditions. That’s why every performance- and cost-conscious network team needs Shunra VE – and why many of the world’s leading network teams say they couldn’t live without it.
For more information about how Shunra's solutions can help you make more confident application-centric network planning and design decisions, please complete this QuickContact form.