Traffic Management

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Overview
You’ve invested in a network infrastructure, and things are going well. So well, in fact, that your network is operating at capacity during peak use. It’s like a highway that becomes congested during rush hour. Students and teachers are accessing rich media content online; administrators are using the Internet to manage grades, attendance records, and schedules.

ENA's traffic management service:

• Boosts performance
• Processes your most important data first
• Ensures users and applications have the bandwidth they need
• Utitlize bandwidth efficiently
• Defers upgrade costs

You can’t always invest a lot to widen the highway, but you can avoid gridlock by adding a high-occupancy vehicle commuter lane that makes it easier for important cars to get through. A lot of different applications and services are competing for your bandwidth. Are you sure the most important ones have access to that capacity when they need it?

The Challenge
Many organizations aren’t in a position to purchase new bandwidth whenever their current bandwidth reaches capacity, especially if the network only maxes out during peak times. This means your users may experience some bottlenecks as different unprioritized activities compete for available bandwidth. The network’s routers and switches see all your traffic as the same and are processing it packet by packet.

To borrow the highway analogy, the interstate is congested, and cars are stuck waiting their turn, one in front of the other. The first car will get through the bottleneck first, and the last one last, regardless of the occupancy of each car.

The Solution
With ENA’s traffic management services, you can increase the bandwidth available to the most important applications and services on your network, while limiting those that are deemed less critical. ENA offers two ways to manage traffic on your network: Traffic prioritization and quality of service (QoS).

Traffic Prioritization
With traffic prioritization, your network gear is able to identify certain packets of data – by protocol, port, or IP address – as more important than others, and process them first. It’s like adding a commuter lane that lets through the most important vehicles first. Prioritization offers a noticeable improvement in performance of applications running on the network. These applications previously competed for bandwidth with Web browsing, downloads, and other unprioritized Internet activities.

Quality of Service (QoS)
QoS can help you ensure that a defined percentage of your available bandwidth is always available to users. With QoS, the mission-critical finance application operates the same on Monday morning as it did on Sunday night, when no one was using the network.

"We've added QoS to help ensure a high quality experience with our voice over IP solution. ENA's traffic management service has helped guarantee that the phones perform well even during peak usage, and since every teacher in the system now has a phone in the classroom, we are talking thousands of calls each month. ENA manages the rest of the network so the experience is consistent and sustainable as we roll out a distance learning system on the network."

– Mike Lay, Technology Coordinator, Scott County, TN

QoS offers the most flexibility over the traffic management on your network. QoS can identify the most important packets of data by the same criteria as traffic prioritization. It adds to the capabilities of traffic management by guaranteeing that a defined percentage of available capacity is reserved for the most  important packets. Using the highway analogy, QoS is like a commuter lane that allows the most  important cars through. When those "important cars" are present, QoS automatically allocates a  percentage of the highway for their use, regardless of the congestion present on the remainder of the
highway.

Your ENA account services manager is ready to talk about your needs to improve available bandwidth performance, and which kind of traffic management is right for you. With traffic management, ENA can optimize the performance of your existing bandwidth, allowing you to make the most of your Internet connectivity investment without an upgrade in capacity.

For more information please call toll-free (866) 615-1101 or contact us via e-mail at info@ena.com.