Layer 7 QoS and Compression Techniques Maximise MPLS Environment at Freight Specialist
ROSELAND, New Jersey, June 7, 2011/PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Expand Networks http://www.expand.com, the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, today announces that Triton Express (http://www.tritonexpress.co.za/homepage.html) has successfully increased visibility and control over its network traffic with Expand Networks' Accelerators. Applying optimization techniques to support its customers in receiving an efficient, dependable and cost-effective service at all times, the freight specialist, Triton, now has a stable and more efficient network environment.
Triton operates in an MPLS environment, where its sites in Durban and Johannesburg serve business applications to 12 branches across the region. The company relies on its WAN for running critical business processes such as freight management, internal administration, waybill tracking, and customer relationship management.
Craig Comins, National IT Manager, and his team wanted to prioritise this, while protecting other critical traffic such as telnet data and voice, which cannot be interrupted. He explains, "With our MPLS contract, we are provided with class of service, but not true quality of service (QoS), which is common. We wanted to create our own QoS to be able to fully control voice, video and data traffic and gain full visibility into our network. Expand showed me how I, as a user, can control all traffic on the network; marking packets into the MPLS last mile for granular QoS and control. This is enabling us to have three different classes of service, all now running at the cost of data class.
"We didn't, however, turn to Expand simply for compression and acceleration to save bandwidth costs, but for visibility and control as well. We wanted to be, and are now, safe in the knowledge that whatever we throw at the network - it can handle it - and every data stream and application will get delivered at the right time."
Recently, Triton decided to replace traditional cameras, used for depot Freight analysis, at its Durban site with HD cameras. This requires a large amount of bandwidth to deliver adequate amounts of frames per second of movement. With the Expand Accelerators in place, Triton is able to prioritise the traffic and maximise the available bandwidth to enable this.
Craig continues; "With Expand, I love the simple but granular real-time graphs I get. I can see exactly how much I've used of what and when. We found that we only use 25% of the link in the afternoon compared to 100% in the morning; this is in line with administrative activity and when most of our vehicles are going out. Therefore, it was clear that any analysis on camera data we needed to do can be done in the afternoon. With 400k data available on the link we have bandwidth to move more than one frame per second, which is more than enough for our analysis purposes. This has been made possible with Avigilon's High Definition Stream Management. For example, we can now easily analyse whether specific items were loaded onto a truck."
The compression capabilities of Expand have delivered significant increases in bandwidth to Triton. This, coupled with the layer 7 QoS and visibility, is helping Craig and his team to manage peaks in demand and protect its business critical applications from congestion, whilst byte level caching techniques have reduced repetitive traffic flowing through the network.
"We are achieving over 30% compression consistently so I now have a fat yellow band on my network graph, as opposed to a precariously thin one. RDP sessions have also significantly improved. Since Expand has been in place, we have not received one complaint about network performance from the users (that we have not been able to solve through QoS on Expand) - I know that if Expand was taken off the network, they would tell us about it! Expand has become an essential technology across all Triton's sites. As a growing organization, Expand's optimization technology has become an integral part of the process for any new office or branch set-up."
