Impact on Enterprise Application Performance

In the current economic environment where growth is tough to come by, Business Ethernet Service (aka Carrier Ethernet, Metro Ethernet) is bucking the trend. A recent analyst report confirms the uptick in growth of these services for Business Applications:

Source: Vertical Systems Group, March 2009

Service providers are reaching critical mass in making Business Ethernet services reliable and scalable which makes the cost savings they provide a serious consideration for Enterprise customers. One of the big issues holding back Enterprise deployments has been last-mile access. That issue has also seen significant improvement as carrier Ethernet footprints have grown significantly.

The Metro Ethernet Forum website provides a nice interactive services directory. You click on a global map and drill down to your locations to see which Service Providers offer Ethernet Services. I searched for Shunra’s HQ location in Philadelphia which resulted in 5 providers to choose from. I selected one provider and here’s what I got:

Here’s the link if you want to try it out:

http://metroethernetforum.org/page_loader.php?p_id=310

And here’s a list of leading Business Ethernet Service providers just published by Vertical Systems Group – my company happens to use Cogent with good success.

So, Enterprise-class Ethernet Business Services are increasingly available, they provide a more scalable and flexible service, and they offer significant bandwidth cost savings. The questions that remain:

• How will my existing applications perform over this new infrastructure?

• How much bandwidth should I buy at each location?

• What type of SLA (network latency, packet loss, availability) do I need to pay for to ensure adequate performance of my business-critical applications?

The ability to answer these questions proactively prior to contract negotiations ( and deployment! ) is the key to effective decision-making. This will ensure you unlock the full savings potential of these services and, more importantly, your end users receive a consistent level of service that ensures a successful service migration.

At Shunra we’ve seen cases where increases in network latency of only a few milliseconds can double Transaction Reponse Times (TRT) for some business transactions. We’ve seen cases where increases in network latency of only 15 ms can cause certain applications to fail completely. Applications that use Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol, such as MS Sharepoint, is an example of an application prone to performance issues due to WAN changes.

The good news: Products are available that allow you to test your application performance in the comfort of your test lab or Data Center prior to service cut-over.  WAN Emulation solutions from companies like Shunra (http://shunra.com/products-overview.php?keyword=products) emulate the behavior of the Business Ethernet Services you’re considering. You can dial the bandwidth limits up and down; you can vary network latency and packet loss; essentially, program in various SLAs and see how your applications perform. You can even do Disaster Recovery testing to recreate automatic fail-over scenarios between service providers.

Here’s an example of an application vulnerable to an increase of only 2.5 ms in WAN latency, and how the problem was identified and resolved prior to cut-over:

http://www.shunra.com/shunrablog/index.php/2009/08/20/data-center-relocation-questions-and-answers-part-2/

Have you migrated some of your offices over to Business Ethernet Service already? Was the migration smooth or painful? Any pearls of wisdom you can offer to others to help them prepare for the change?