2. Vice President, Technical Services
Liad Ofek
Vice President, Technical Services
Expand Networks

3. Clearing the Way for VoIP in the Branch
What’s the Hidden Cost?
The promise and the reality of VoIP
VoIP challenges in the Branch Office
The Expand Compass Solution for VoIP deployments

4. Conflicting Commercial & User Requirements
80% of Users are Remote!
87% of Users are Remote! HQ
Cost-reduction
Simplicity
Consolidation
Business Continuity
Regulatory Compliance
REMOTE
Globalization
Productivity
Corporate HQ
Remote User
Remote User
Tokyo Remote User gives up
Lack of productivity
IT initiatives should align with the business initiatives (productivity, cost-reductions, simplicity, business continuity, globalization, regulatory compliance, consolidation). However, for the IT initiatives to be successful, you should also consider the remote users and the effects of the WAN … most of your users are remote.
With 87% of the enterprise workforce being remote, the impact on the remote user is a significant business cost and must be addressed!
This is the pain we are going to solve.
Remote User
San Francisco Remote User annoyed
Poor response time
London Remote User frustrated
High support costs

5. The Promise of Voice/Video and Data Convergence
Reduces cost
Simplifies management
Provides enhanced features
Delivers greater mobility for the distributed business
Provides same quality as PSTN calls
Converged Voice, Data, Video – unified infrastructure for feature-rich applications
Convergence made easy and even more cost-effective with MPLS (Multi-protocol packet switching)
Voice/Video Over IP are here to stay…BUT...

6. The Reality The WAN limits the success of Convergence
Low speed links for remote sites – 128kbps, 512kbps, T1’s/E1’s
Low visibility for existing application bandwidth consumption
Performance challenges
Unacceptable voice quality
Greedy and bursty competing applications
MPLS access points are still congested…QoS is not enough
More data is thrown over the WAN
Server consolidation
Web services
Disaster recovery
Voice is not the only business critical application
Other data applications can’t be degraded to improve voice quality

7. More Applications Deployed To The Branch
____________
1011
0100
87% of employees work from the branch (Nemertes, 2004)
New applications
Internet / Intranet
VoIP
Same WAN
Frame Relay
Leased lines
IP VPN
MPLS
______ ______
1010
____________
1001
0101
0101
Key trends are placing undue strain on Wide Area Networks. First, branch demand is increasing. Up to 87% of all employees now work in branch offices (source: Nemertes). Companies are conducting more business in the branches and further automating paper-based processes.

8. Remote Branch Challenges
Insufficient Capacity and Burst
Enterprise applications are typically developed for the LAN environment, and they often “go bad” when they are deployed over the WAN to remote locations. There are several reasons for this. The WAN link often does not offer enough capacity to support business requirements. For example, imagine a small remote office with a 56 Kbps or 128 Kbps Frame Relay connection. This link would not even support the requirements for even a handful of concurrent users. If a half dozen users were online, each would receive far less bandwidth than if they had even a dedicated dial-up connection to the central location. The WAN connection would not accommodate these bursts of traffic and would provide poor application performance for all users.

9. Remote Branch Challenges
Insufficient Capacity and Burst
Latency and Chatty Applications
There will always be some measurable latency (or delay) between a physical application server and the client. On a high-speed LAN this latency is too small to notice, but on the WAN there may be 60, 70, 100, or even 200 milliseconds of latency on each transmission, which is extremely noticeable to the user. In addition, some applications are “chatty” in that they take many back-and-forth transmissions to establish a session or complete a transaction. For example, loading a Web page takes at least 5 or 6 exchanges before the page actually appears, which translates to from about 500 milliseconds up to 2 or even 3 seconds.

10. Remote Branch Challenges
Insufficient Capacity and Burst
Latency and Chatty Applications
Intermittent Connectivity and Packet Loss
As enterprises move more toward public network infrastructure for branch office connectivity, other problems arise. Intermittent connectivity, packet loss, and out-of-order packets are WAN issues that also impact application performance, and some applications are “greedier” than others and require more WAN resources. For example, VoIP not only requires more bandwidth than most other applications, it is also more sensitive to jitter and packet loss than traditional applications such as file transfers.

11. Remote Branch Challenges
Insufficient Capacity and Burst
Latency and Chatty Applications
Intermittent Connectivity and Packet Loss
Last, but not least, enterprise are trying to push too many applications to the branch office. Some of these applications are not very well-behaved (like data replication and backups) or are even not sanctioned (like Internet Radio or gaming). Hence, congestion occurs, contributing to poor application performance.
Congestion and Greedy Applications

12. The Complete Technology Solution for VoIP
Complex problems require complete solutions. The Expand Compass shows how the Expand platform can deliver the complete solution, meeting all of the business needs.

13. WAN Optimization
Compression - reduce data over the WAN: free up the WAN capacity for Voice
WAN Compression
Gigabyte Caching
These are the technologies that are part of the WAN Optimization piece of the Compass.

14. Best-of-breed WAN Compression
Patented algorithms
Byte-level caching
Packet header reduction
Adaptive packet compression
Fully transparent
A fully transparent solution, Next-generation WAN compression combines byte-level caching, packet header reduction and adaptive packet compression. When data repeats, the Accelerators cache it, holding byte-level caches at the edge of the network.

15. Next-Generation WAN Compression
When data repeats, content is delivered from the edge
The “bandwidth effect”
Content is then delivered from the edge of the network thereby achieving the "bandwidth effect."

16. WAN Throughput Improvements
Increase WAN capacity
Benefits all applications
Transparent to WAN, applications, servers and users
Alternative to WAN upgrades with a 3 – 9 month ROI
We have literally been able to trick our 56Kbps lines into behaving like T1s
– Julie Williams, VP & Compliance Officer
First National Bank Iowa
Microsoft Exchange 0%
Lotus Notes
SAP
NetBIOS
Intranet
Web
XML
Disaster Recovery
Citrix
200%
400%
600%
800%
1000%
1200% 2X 4X 6X 8X
10X
12X
Typical Improvements
Peak Improvements
Byte level caching and compression
The benefit: More capacity for all applications with a 3 to 9 month ROI.
Additional WAN capacity

17. WAN Optimization QoS - Guarantee voice quality Shaping
Traffic priority
MPLS tagging
Policy scheduling
Bandwidth limitation
These are the technologies that are part of the WAN Optimization piece of the Compass.

18. QoS - Gain Application Control
Prioritize and control apps
Guaranteed, min/max bandwidth for key applications
Control/block rogue applications
Seamless integration with other optimization services
We were able to configure VoIP QoS with a simple configuration at 30% less than the Telco cost
–Jacob Nielsen, Network Administrator Brenntag Nordic
QoS enables the shaping of network traffic to further optimize application performance via three steps: 1) traffic is categorized into “application classes,"; 2) bytes and packets entering and exiting the network are tallied, thus providing a clear picture of network traffic consumption; and, 3) shaping policies govern the flow of traffic as it enters and exits the Accelerator.

19. Acceleration
Optimize all applications to improve application response time
Application Acceleration
Voice Optimization (Fragmentation)
HTTP Acceleration
FTP Acceleration
DNS Acceleration
HTTPS Acceleration
Citrix Acceleration
Protocol Acceleration
TCP Acceleration
SCPS Reliability
These are the technologies that are part of the Acceleration piece of the Compass.

20. How Does Voice Optimization Work ?
If applications sharing a low bandwidth link include FTP and VoIP, small VoIP packets may be delayed
Fragmentation will sub-divide the large packets and insert the small
Reassembly performed at remote Accelerator
Applied only to QoS default and low priority queues
It is possible to configure the Accelerator such that while large packets (such as for FTP, HTTP data, etc) are being transmitted, they cannot temporarily “block “ a Link and negatively affect latency and jitter sensitive applications such as VoIP. This is achieved by dividing up large packets and interspersing the fragments with latency sensitive packets.
Fragmentation is accomplished on outgoing packets before the packets are compressed and such should not be enabled if aggregation has been enabled (as aggregation will combine all of the fragments!).
The remote Accelerator will reassemble the packets.
Note that Fragmentation can only occur before any of a large packet has been transmitted and will not happen if a datagram has the “Don’t Fragment” flag set.

21. Visibility & Management
Visibility for VoIP performance
ExpandView
Central Management
Inventory & License Management
Global Visibility
Ease of Deployment
Application & Network Visibility
Automatic Application Discovery
NetFlow
SLA Management
These are the technologies that are part of the Visibility & Management piece of the Compass.

22. Visibility Into Application Performance
Visibility for World-class NOCs
Network, application & performance statistics
Application performance and alerting
Network trending and analysis
…more impressive were the monitoring capabilities that offered in-depth visibility & enabled us to tune the performance of Microsoft Office
–Ovvyng Harewood, IT Director for the Ministry of Finance, Gov of Barbados
End-to-end monitoring and reporting provides complete network visibility and enables speedy response to application performance changes on an enterprise-wide scale. Expand delivers “Application insurance” by automatically discovering and classifying more than 100 enterprise applications. By streamlining management tasks into a single interface, the technology allows for centralized management and bandwidth control – ideal for large scale deployments.

23. Security Encryption AAA IP Sec Tunneling 3 DES Authentication
Authorization
Accounting
RADIUS
TACACS+
These are the technologies that are part of the Security piece of the Compass.

24. WAFS (Wide Area File Services)
Will VoIP be affected by server consolidation ?
Terminate CIFS protocol locally (proxy) to eliminate “chattiness” over the WAN
Cache the objects to provide LAN-like performance
Consolidate other RBO services to provide LAN performance (print, DNS, DHCP, Etc.)
These are the technologies that are part of the WAFS piece of the Compass.

25. How Does WAFS Work?

26. Summary
Merging voice and data networks can cause significant problems which can offset the financial benefits of VoIP if not addressed properly
Technologies like compression, QoS, protocol and application acceleration, and monitoring are essential to establishing VoIP as an integral application for the branch