Migrating to MPLS

Don't get caught in the MPLS spider web. Understand applications and optimize WAN performance with a new suite of tools.

The Challenge: Right Class of Service

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is meeting global acceptance—anddeservedly so. Carriers get a more scalable, efficient infrastructure.Enterprises simplify their WAN. Yet Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVCs)routing challenges make it difficult to leverage the power of IP foradvanced services.

Applications and Class of Service Assignment

Many Applications, Few Classes

MPLS leverages multiple classes of service. Voice gets assigned to the highest class to ensure best performance. Casual Web browsing receives best effort. To properly assign what application—out of hundreds—gets assigned which class—out of a handful—demands accurate identification.Not so easy.

No Good Way to Sort

How do you sort through hundreds of business, recreational and "invisible" applications? IP addresses and port numbers fall short. Using router ACLs to map applications to class of service threatens the performance and stability of the critical routing infrastructure.

QoS Not Guaranteed

In MPLS, there's no way to manage inbound rates—two servers sending to a single branch can oversubscribe an inbound link. Even class assignment doesn't guarantee same class-level performance. Too many voice packets, for example, cause congestion at the LAN-WAN transition point. Overwhelming a voice class forces drops or lower class assignment, risking performance.

More Issues, Tools and Costs

Point products are popping up to deal with the growing complexity, increased bandwidth demand and WAN applications delivery. A probe formonitoring. QoS to manage bandwidth allocation. Compression and acceleration devices to enlarge capacity and speed performance. Deciding which or what to use poses a burden on IT staff and budget.

Great PVC Loss

The reduction of point-to-point PVCs removes a basic management construct and undermines the power and meshed connectivity of IP. Transitioning to a single or few PVCs per site forfeits the critical ability to allocate bandwidth between sites, measure SLAs and availability and troubleshoot issues.

The Packeteer Solution: See the Light

Get or maintain complete application visibility, guarantee end-to-end QoS and user experience. Get what you pay for and pay only for what you need. Assess and Plan Capacity Needs To prepare for a migration to MPLS services, you have to understand your network and application environment. Leverage Packeteer's Layer 7 Plus technology to identify and measure the applications running on your network, helping to determine:

• What applications run on your network
• What applications are taking how much bandwidth
• How much capacity is needed for each class of service
• How different classes of service perform

Assign Proper Class of Service

After you design and implement your MPLS service, you have to operate it. Once again, leverage Packeteer's Layer 7 Plus classification technologies to differentiate traffic and use Packeteer's policy framework to mark packets with the proper DiffServ, ToS or VLAN tag to
get them into your carrier's class of service.

Deliver End-to-End QoS

Packeteer enhances the carrier Class of Service (CoS), improving the end-to-end QoS expected by users. Allocate inbound bandwidth, provide per session guarantees, and, most importantly, take advantage of Layer 7 Plus intelligence to validate and separate network traffic into actual applications.

Increase WAN Capacity, Not Bandwidth

Advanced compression algorithms provide low-latency, high-impact compression to increase WAN capacity and create room for business critical applications. No bandwidth upgrades required!

Protect Availability

Suppress DDoS, virus and worm propagation. Weed out security threats through Packeteer's Distributed Threat Suppression. Identify and isolate infected hosts, mitigating network impact. Our Flow Detail Records provide a detailed repository for forensic and compliance purposes.

Optimize WAN Applications

Discover applications, track network utilization, monitor application performance, ensure QoS, increase capacity through compression and accelerate applications—all in a single appliance—to deliver business applications over the WAN.