Bandwidth Optimization - Cisco Overview Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Bandwidth Optimization - Cisco Overview

Tuesday, July 31, 2007Penn Club, New York

David Newman, President, Network Test Inc.

© 2007 Gerson Lehrman Group Inc., All Rights Reserved

Council Member Biography

David Newman is the President at Network Test, Inc, an engineering

services firm specializing in network device benchmarking and network

design. The company provides services to equipment manufacturers,

service providers, large enterprises, and trade publications. Mr. Newman

is a participant in the Internet Engineering Task Force, the body that

defines standards for Internet and IP networking. He has been breaking

computer networks for 20 years. He is a frequent speaker at industry

conferences and has authored IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)

RFC’s on firewall performance measurement. Mr. Newman is a member

of Network World’s Global Test Alliance, and has conducted many tests of

network infrastructure and security devices. He is also the author of RFCs

2647 and 3511, the Internet Engineering Task Force's specifications for

firewall performance testing. Prior to founding Network Test in 1999, Mr.

Newman served for over 10 years as the Director of Lab Testing for Data

Communications magazine.


Table of Contents

► About Network Test

► Understanding the problem

► Understanding the market

► Selected test results

► Beyond acceleration

► Q & A


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About Network Test Independent test lab, founded 1999 Clients

Equipment vendors Trade publications Large enterprises Service providers

Active in developing testing standards

Most work done under NDA

Understanding the problem WAN links carry the lifeblood

of every corporation Monthly WAN costs account for

52% of corporate IT budgets (Forrester)

New applications, users are overloading already overtaxed circuits

LANs and WANs are different

LAN: Virtually 0 delay, loss, jitter

WAN: High delay, loss, jitter

Big impacton the wayapps work

App designimplications

Round Trip Time (RTT) ~ 0mS

Client LAN Switch Server

Round Trip Time (RTT) ~ many many milliseconds

ServerClientLAN Switch

LAN Switch

WAN

Illustrations: Cisco Systems Inc.

Understanding the problem:3 major complaints 1. “Our telecom bill is too high” 2. “Our response times are too

high” 3. “Our transfer rates are too low”

— however —

All have the same root cause…

The actual problem

Windows is lousy in the WAN

How bad is Windows in the WAN? Windows stack designed for LAN

use Windows XP lacks key TCP options

Bad on dynamic window sizing No window scaling No support for modern TCP speedups

The result: Loss, congestion, delay Vista is better, but currently 0% share

How bad is Windowsin the WAN? Many bandwidth calculators on the net Assumptions:

64-kbyte TCP receive window 100-ms roundtrip time

Max rate/connection EVER: ~5.6 Mbit/s True with T3, OC-x, whatever… Don’t bother with that OC-48

The solution: Application acceleration Symmetrical devices sit on either

end of a WAN link

Application acceleration vendor list Blue Coat Cisco Citrix Exinda F5 Networks

Juniper Packeteer Riverbed Silver Peak Excludes

asymmetrical data-center device vendors (eg, Crescendo)

The acceleration arsenal Caching, sort of Pre-positioning Compression Application-layer optimization TCP optimization Read-ahead/write-behind Connection multiplexing Classification/prioritization (QoS)

Application acceleration vendor list, again Blue Coat

Security Cisco

Transparency Citrix

App awareness Exinda

“Aussie underdog,” proposed UPM standard

F5 Networks Lots of products, WAN

accel a sideline

Juniper Lots of products,

mostly lower-speed Packeteer

Longtime bandwidth optimizer

Riverbed Pure-play WAN accel

player Silver Peak

Focused on the high end

Testing acceleration Results to appear in 8/13 Network World 4 vendors, 7+ months on the test bed Tested performance, functionality,

manageability, usability What’s my application mix? What’s my network topology? What are my goals for app acceleration?

Design considerations Top applications for end-users

CIFS/SMB MAPI HTTP HTTPS (optional in our tests) Prioritized <foo>

Top applications for data centers DoubleTake Backup/DR

Testing WAN acceleration performance

“Meaningful” performance testing must address both bandwidth and delay

Measure bandwidth reduction, rates, connections

Enterprise-scale testing is hard Should cover all permutations of bw,

delay (and optionally loss, fragmentation, jitter)

The logical test bed

The physical test bed

CIFS testing Upload and download Word files Make file counts, sizes proportional

to link speed 3 runs

“Cold”: Caches empty “Warm”: Caches populated “10%”: Change contents in 10% of

files

WAN bandwidth reduction

0102030405060708090

Acceleration factor

No accelerationVendor 1 warmVendor 2 warmVendor 3 warmVendor 4 warmVendor 1 10%Vendor 2 10%Vendor 3 10%Vendor 4 10%

CIFS downloads, 10% run

0 20 40 60

Vendor 1

Vendor 2

Vendor 3

Vendor 4

Response-time improvement factor

Low bandwidth, highdelayHigh bandwidth, lowdelayLow bandwidth, lowdelayHigh bandwidth, highdelay

CIFS uploads, 10% run

0 10 20 30 40

Vendor 1

Vendor 2

Vendor 3

Vendor 4



MAPI testing MAPI

Dominant corporate email protocol If you use Exchange/Outlook, you use

MAPI Create 100s of messages, measure

xfer time Testing gotchas:

“Offline” isn’t Outlook version matters, a lot

MAPI testing

0 1 2 3

Vendor 1

Vendor 2

Vendor 3

Vendor 4



Maximum connections Important for high-end installations Not a key metric -- yet

1000s-10000s today, 100,000k-1m soon Less important for large installations

with low link speeds Can’t stuff enough traffic in all those T1s

We only count optimized connections Everything else is bridged

Concurrent TCP connections

19,499

50,113

12,202

43,306

0

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

60,000

Maximum optimized

TCP connections

Vendor 1 Vendor 2 Vendor 3 Vendor 4

Testing Manageability Central control of image, config, and

devices Touch once, change many

Real-time reporting on traffic flows Start here: “What’s on my network?”

Support for partitioned, delegated mgmt

“If/then support” for special events If you care, integration with NMSs

Testing Usability How well does the device help you

understand your traffic? Auto-classification Real- and non real-time reporting on

flows and acceleration

Beyond acceleration High-end vendors add other features

Acceleration for clients Telecommuters, road warriors, smartphones

High availability Blue Coat, Cisco offer clustering

Interoperability with rest of network A big deal for Cisco NBAR, auto-QOS

QoS classification/prioritization UDP, SSL, MPLS, more apps in the pipeline

Thanks! Questions? [email protected]

Bandwidth Optimization - Cisco Overview Tuesday, July 31, 2007

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