Bandwidth is valuable to any business, and like any road or motorway, you always find that the more bandwidth you have, the quicker your users find ways to consume it! Like a motorway, packets can get jammed, so vital applications that are time sensitive like voice and video can be adversely impacted by other applications such as e-mail and web browsing which are not so time sensitive. At OpenIP we can provide intelligently managed solutions based around Cisco Integrated Services Routers or Sonicwall Firewalls. However, if you already have a network infrastructure in place, the DBAM Systems Exbander Precision is ideal.

Exbander Precision enables bandwidth usage to be designed to suit the needs of the business, provides quality of service policy enforcement and improves network efficiency in heavy demand periods on the IP Network.
By designing the bandwidth usage, control can be applied to different types of traffic so that the traffic can be categorised and grouped, and specific policies applied to the groups. Traffic can be categorised by almost any element of the packets, such as source or destination addresses, source or destination TCP/UDP port numbers, or pre-defined QoS tags. Once the administrator has categorised the traffic using Exbander Precision, specific policies can be applied to the different traffic groups. Standard policies that can be implemented include giving certain traffic a higher priority (and access to the bandwidth) than other traffic; one commonly implemented scenario is giving VoIP traffic priority over all other types of traffic, to ensure call quality during busy periods on the network. Exbander Precision can also grant a specific amount of bandwidth to traffic in a certain group, or a certain amount of bandwidth to each unique connection.

Design

The Exbander Precision identifies all traffic flows traversing the link that it is installed on. The observation process, via the flow viewer feature, allows IT personnel to make decisions about the traffic's importance and using this information, policies can be created. The Exbander Precision enables traffic flows to be designed and defined to suit the exact needs of the business. The Exbander Precision's unique bandwidth design capability ensures that the performance of the physical infrastructure is maximised by creating rules for all traffic flows.

Commit

Rules for each flow can be easily created, committing the bandwidth resource specifically to suit the flow's relevance to the business. The flow can be a single stream, or one or more groups of streams defined by application type, user type or other criteria. Precision allows business critical traffic to be configured to receive its bandwidth as and when it is needed, and ensures that the non-critical traffic receives its bandwidth when capacity on the link is available. Designed and committed bandwidth enforces the policies ensuring that the resource is used to deliver its intended function at all times.

Utilise

The link utilisation is maximised because the network resources are always delivered to their target. Random network events are managed so that they do not impact the committed traffic. Link resources that have been designed for specific traffic, such as VoIP or Citrix, are only affected in the way that they are designed to be. If the configured resources are not being utilised concurrently, they can be "borrowed" by other traffic so that resources are not wasted. The Exbander Precision's control ensures the best utilisation of the network for the business, and a maximising of return on investment in network services.

Report

The Exbander Precision's advanced record and playback functionality provides a powerful and flexible basis for monitoring and reporting the network's performance. The Exbander Precision can be installed initially as a passive monitoring device, allowing the reported traffic data to be used to design and configure the flows to bring order to the business network.

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