A project to consolidate servers in a central data centre highlighted the need for international law firm Reed Smith to use traffic-shaping technology to ensure that its most important applications perform well on its now-critical WAN.
So far Reed Smith has used Packeteer PacketShapers to prioritise key flows, limit or block unnecessary traffic and adjust the size of its WAN links to make the network as cost-effective as possible, says Frank Hervert, senior manager of network and messaging services for the firm.
He doesn't have a quantified return on investment, but the Packeteer appliances enable him to cost-justify increases or decreases in bandwidth, so the firm doesn't pay for bandwidth it doesn't use. "Over a six-month term that will easily save me money beyond the cost of the PacketShaper," he says.
The equipment also provides monitoring and records that enable Reed Smith to double-check carrier services and ensure that service providers meet service-level agreements and configure the network in accordance with its design, he says.
The Pittsburgh-based law firm has 15 offices in the US and six offices overseas. Each used to have its own Internet access and servers, but for the past two years, the firm has been consolidating its servers and Internet access at a leased secure data centre.
The centralisation is about 60 percent complete for the US offices, Hervert says. In June, the firm plans to switch its foreign offices to a new European data centre based on the same model.
Centralised apps
The US data centre contains 180 Citrix servers that host the law firm's key applications, including common office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and e-mail. "All of that processing is centralised out...
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...olicies the firm sets, for example, if an office generates more than 75 percent of total traffic the Packeteer devices send an alert.
Or if a particular application generates traffic outside the norm, the gear automatically creates a separate traffic class for it. The new class jumps out when Hervert reviews routine network performance reports, he says. The gear also generates an e-mail about the spike in traffic.
The firm does not take advantage of Packeteer's ability to compress traffic across WAN links. So far, there is enough bandwidth to keep performance high without it, says Hervret. The goal is to get the Citrix traffic and voice traffic among offices running well, then add IP video to the mix over time, he says.
"The PacketShape is our view, our measurement of what's there, of what's behaving on the network and what we can add to it," Hervert says.
Third quarter revenues improved by 1%, over the same period last year, and operating income increased by 3%. During this quarter they invested in Shaw Go WiFi, which provides users with carrier-grade Internet connectivity at approximately 65,000 hotspots. At the end of May they had over 660,000 Internet customers registered on the network connecting over 1.8 million devices.
Cisco Designs, manufactures, and sells Internet Protocol (IP) - based networking and other products related to the communications and information technology (IT) industry and provide services associated with these products and their use. The company provides products for transporting data, voice within buildings, across campuses and globally. The products are utilized at enterprise businesses, public institutions, telecommunications companies and other service providers, commercial businesses, and personal residences. Cisco conducts its business globally and manages its business geographically. Its business is divided into the following three geographic segments: The Americans; Europe, M...
In 1994, Jim Donehey was brought in to update Capital One’s IT system. His solution was to replace their aging mainframe computers with an object-based system, but this technology had never been used on such a large scale. In contrast, two-thirds of Capital One’s competitors outsourced their IT functions. Within 5 years the company had the world’s largest Oracle database with 23 terabytes of data – winning them the Gartner Group’s Excellence in Technology Award.
Cisco Systems is one of the largest network communications company in the world. Cisco provides networking solutions that customers use to build a integrated information infrastructure of their own, or to connect to someone else’s network. Cisco also offers an extensive range of hardware products used to form information networks, or to give them access to these networks. Cisco also has it’s own software called IOS software, which provides network services and enables networked applications. Cisco serves customers in a wide range of businesses, such as corporations, government agencies, utilities, and educational institutes, and small to medium size businesses. Cisco sells it’s products worldwide. They serve as many as 115 different countries. They have more than 225 sales and support offices in 75 countries. Cisco strongly believes in the advantages of a global networked business. By using networked applications over the internet and it’s own internal network, Cisco is gaining financial contribution of at least $825 million a year in operating costs savings and revenue enhancements. Today, Cisco is the largest commerce site, with 87% of their orders are transacted over the web.
This tool is an excellent way to get in touch with our card members and to see how they feel the company is doing and what they feel is going right and what needs to be worked on. By doing this the company can take this information and better the customer satisfaction by either up training of employees are reviewing and possibly changing the policies or procedures.
Currently, the company has more than 60,000 employees who work in more than 90 countries to help customers in finding, evaluating, drilling , producing, transporting and processing their resources. The company is also organized into four regions which are Europe, Africa, and Russia Caspian (EARC), Middle East and Asia Pacific(MEAP), North America, and Latin America, with head Quarters in Houston, TX, United States of America.
The group has extensive global network of over 48 offices covering about 32 countries and territories around the world. The group's network extends outside Asia and into other markets like North America, Europe and South Africa. The group sources from around 10,000 internal supplies. Global network enables the group to source its goods from various locations and distribute it in different countries mitigating its exposure to any particular economy.
It (Headquarters) now stays in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. with 6000 employees and a net income of US599.1 million as of 2011.
A key consideration of planning future network capacity is determining what services, users, and data will be present on the network. Take the time to complete a thorough site analysis. A bit of formal analysis now will ease the process of upgrading and configuring the system later. Don't succumb to the "easy way out." Planning can be a long and arduous task that is overlooked far too often, but one that pays off ultimately. Network Capacity Analysis
According to Sommerville (2011), the Provides interface are services provided by the component, where the Requires interface specifies what services are needed by the other components in the system to operate correctly, (p. 457). The hospital wants to improve the tracking of VOIP calls which are made within the hospital system. The emergency control room will have a system for the call-logging component which will record the calls made. The first component would be for tracking the phone calls. The Require interface can be the caller id service which feeds into the component. With the caller id service, the Provides interface will be to see the phone number calling to, the phone number calling from, the time of the call, the length of the call, and a log file to see all the calls place from a phone or all phones. To track the calls the management is going to wait to see the phones numbers of the internal calls are from and to. Management is going to also want to see the time of the call and how long the call lasted. If management believe employees are spending too much time on the phone talking and doing it more often than needed, management can pull a log of those tw...
...irplane that the inspector can navigate through via voice commands to mark a region of the airplane that is in need of service. Once identified, the application tags the area for transmission to the maintenance database and initiates the proper form for the inspector to fill out. The form is completed and then transmitted to the same maintenance database. When the inspector has identified all of the problems with a particular region, voice navigation is used to continue to other areas of the aircraft. The inspector is not required to take any information about the aircraft, previous defect records, clipboards, paper, etc. with them, everything required to perform the inspection is on-line and displayed in a manageable fashion in real time during the inspection. When the inspector completes the inspection, no further input is required. The inspector is not required to take notes and then pass them off to someone else to decipher and input to the system. The information is already in the maintenance database and ready for verification, planning, and scheduling.
A flow is a sequence of packets which are sent from a source or from a destination which follows the same route through a network. It is mainly used in resource allocation. Also flow can have different granularities. For example: Host to host flow or process to process flow.
All these improvements will boost profitability by identifying at least or more that EUR 30 mio required by U.S.A headquarters. However, we believe it is not realistic to manage all this turnaround in 1 year’s time. It might take from 2 – 3 years.
Hollows, P 2002, 'Essentials of a smooth-running network', Communications News, vol. 39, no. 7, p. 16.