subject: Speeding Up Your Enterprise Application To Remote Users Over Internet [print this page] I have a friend whose company delivers IT training through remote lab simulation for customers all over the world. There was a problem with his newest product, which was a remote lab that included servers, shared storage, all in a real world virtualization set up. All of the users outside of the United States were having performance and latency issues.
The delivery of an application over the Internet is complex. almost all traffic over the Internet is delivered using the TCP/IP protocol, which is designed to reliably deliver traffic over paths that are assumed to be unreliable. The delivery over the Internet of TCP traffic can be fast and a reliable environment, since the dynamic when doing of the TCP protocol will expand the bandwidth of the transmission as long as no packets are being dropped. As soon as packets are dropped, which is especially common over long distances, the TCP window shrinks as does the effective bandwidth.
What happens when TCP/IP traffic is transmitted worldwide, especially over the Internet when it goes through a number of different service providers and their peering points, is that packets are dropped as a matter of course. Due to the inherent nature of the protocol and situation, this means bandwidth, performance, and latency are going to be poor for an application requiring interactivity. Large organizations have always done with this issue by building out a worldwide private Wide Area Network.
My friend needed a way to accelerate the Internet delivery of an application for individual users, without putting any program on their PC or installing special hardware at their site. This is very difficult to do, because the application required reliable delivery of all its parts, and the very nature of TCP over the Internet would slow it down. Furthermore, he wanted to be able to increase the effective bandwidth by compression then expansion of the data delivered.
In order to build this out himself, he would need to get servers and software at the head end and all the remote sites near his customers. This software who would have to do the compression and expansion, dynamic DNS to send the end user to the correct remote site server, and send multiple packets over different routes to ensure delivery. This system would also need to be monitored to make sure everything was running properly all the time.
Obviously, this would have been a cost prohibitive exercise for my friend. Fortunately, he found a company that offers this type of acceleration as a service. In fact, this company has tens of thousands of service deployed in most datacenters worldwide, which can be used for dynamic content delivered over the Internet. Examples of content that can be accelerated include:
- Faster virtual desktop infrastructure delivery.
- Speed up any end-user applications delivered by HTML or IP.
- Remote office and end-user VPN acceleration.
- Large files such as versions of software applications.
- Shift application delivery from the WAN to the Internet.
If you are experiencing slow application performance over the Internet, you should definitely look for a company that's able to provide this service. Most organizations typically do a test run with whatever application is causing the most issues and problems at the time. A local reseller that is competent and experienced in improving network performance would be able to recommend a solution for you.
