Wan bandwidth optimization tools

WAN optimization technology and other closely related technologies such as application acceleration, WAN compression , etc. Such a technology combination greatly accelerates network and application performance for businesses. As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, users are demanding more technology tools and products to match the stride and so are vendors relentlessly developing more technology solutions.

The current WAN optimization market has demands for technologies incorporating pattern-matching, protocol analysis, business policies, the WAN optimization plan along with automation and correlation. WAN compression is also an important technology that is sought after as part of WAN optimization technologies.

During the transference of large data blocks, it is not unusual for duplication to occur. Duplicate data consumes bandwidth and has a direct effect on the functioning of the WAN. The deduplication process checks data and determines if it has been sent before. If it has, data is not transmitted. Compression has a direct bearing on bandwidth requirements. All data cannot be compressed to the same extent.

For example a jpeg file is pre-compressed and compression algorithms will have no effect. However, Word documents, Excel files, etc. Caching reduces time taken to access data. For example, if a large corporation with operations in hundreds of places, issues an all employee bulletin, the demand on the WAN is significant. As each employee tries to access the same information, the stress on the system to accommodate all requests is very significant. WAN optimization uses caching to dramatically reduce loads as well as decrease the time it takes to access.

When an employee of a branch first accesses the bulletin, WAN Optimization stores a copy in local cache. The optimization system also ensures the data saved locally is up-to-date. If changes have been made on the source data, only those changes are sent across the WAN rather than the whole. WAN Optimization has become an important component in the administration of an efficient network.

The use of such techniques is bound to grow for the foreseeable future. The growth of network complexity has produced many more potential points of degradation and failure. Faster WAN caching than the other WAN Optimization and optimization products that cache only at the file level — FatPipe provides the benefit of storage at the byte level — no stale data.

FatPipe WAN Optimization comes with a Real Time Chart that provides information about original, un-optimized data per site and after optimization statistics. Get further granular control of your data flow with FatPipe QoS, which includes application layer and networking layer QoS.

In a distributed environment between sites it is likely that data will be lost or corrupted during transmission. With usage of FatPipe's auto-synch technology, you drastically reduce the change of data being out-of-synch or corrupted between remote ends.

Also look into using WAN bandwidth optimization tools, which can help improve your WAN performance specifically in relation to cloud services. Consider using cloud services if your company collaborates with external service providers or has home-based or freelance staff.

Anytime you want to procure new hardware or shift to a different piece of software, management has to agree to make space for these things in the budget. Present any network-performance reports to management in a visually pleasing and easy-to-understand format. This will make a much clearer and stronger case for purchasing additional hardware, reorganizing your network, or investing in network performance and management tools.

You can make massive improvements by simply building a complete understanding of how your network functions. Use a network performance management and monitoring tool to gather all the necessary information so you can improve network bandwidth for your business.

To get started, determine baseline behavior and map your network topology, so you have a picture of your network before you begin. Then, look at improving and optimizing traffic flows through subnetting, rerouting, and changing your network topology to be meshed with enough links for traffic to flow smoothly. Next, optimize the data through compression techniques, balancing network loads, and traffic shaping.

After that, develop internal policies to reduce unnecessary data from passing through the network, including clear whitelists or blacklists for websites, as well as email attachment policies. Another important step in improving network bandwidth is to begin recording all your network traffic and determining which parts are the slowest.

You also need to know where the demand for bandwidth is the highest to re-balance your network. To do this, you need a bandwidth monitoring tool. A few companies dominate this space, and several provide tools useful in different ways. Some are more focused on mapping or baselining your network, while others are more suitable for finding rogue devices and applications.

Likewise, certain tools are designed for network troubleshooting, while others target optimization. Below are my favorite tools to improve network performance, including some ideal for extensive analysis and large networks, as well as a few more suited to smaller or home systems. However, they can also be used as standalone tools for optimizing bandwidth and performance. NTA offers multi-vendor network monitoring, so you can keep track of everything happening on your network.

It provides historical and current network performance metrics and includes graphs and interfaces, so you can visualize your network easily—a critical part of baselining your network.

One of the great things about NPM, in turn, is its ability to set these baselines and use them to create alerts for when your network is not functioning correctly. Alerts might notify you of changes to network topology, performance slowdowns, or other trigger conditions, and you can even create alerts to work through nested parent-child dependencies. This can lead to faster troubleshooting as you see how each data set affects the next. Having a clear idea of what your network looks like, including the relationships between devices, servers, and volumes, helps you isolate problems pertaining to health and performance.

With NetPath, you can see all devices, applications, networks, and vendors in a single-page path analysis, which leads to much faster troubleshooting. The level of information provided by Bandwidth Analyzer Pack is impressive, encompassing detailed data about your networks and the applications running on them. And the combination of NetFlow Traffic Analyzer and Network Performance Monitor is seamless, resulting in a comprehensive and high-quality bandwidth troubleshooting and network performance tool.

Other network performance offerings from SolarWinds include NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, which I consider to be the best bandwidth control software on the market. One of its most valuable features is how it integrates with the industry-leading solution Network Performance Monitor to serve as a complete analysis and monitoring package.

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer provides bandwidth and traffic usage information and can tell you how much bandwidth is being used based on the IP address, application, or protocol.

It includes a high level of detail, and lets you look with high granularity at individual endpoints, protocols, and domains, which allows for fast resolution of bandwidth issues even in satellite offices. This allows you to record only those top bandwidth flows, which can improve your database performance and increase reporting speed. It can also focus your attention on which parts of your network require the most optimization, or where you might want to choose a less-bandwidth-intensive application.

This feature can help with security issues as well, helping you pinpoint the source of ransomware or malware infections transmitting higher levels of data through the network.

Recording and baselining your network sets you up to take troubleshooting steps to optimize your bandwidth. NTA facilitates this process by offering network traffic forensics, allowing you to record information on your network for a long period of time, and then determine optimizations based on the analysis NTA provides.

And it shows you all these different features in one centralized interface, which helps you to get a quick and easy overview of how your entire network is performing. It also shows you the tools you have recently used, so frequently used tools are easier to access. Its intuitive web console works with its five most popular tools, so you can access them wherever you have an internet connection:.

I highly recommend this tool for network engineers, as it has all your everyday and high-use network troubleshooting tools in one place. The graphical interface is also good-looking and easy to use. Proper management of your network is key to optimizing bandwidth. First, it performs automatic subnet discovery and IP address scanning, so you can see how your IP addresses are organized and used.

This can help with selecting a network topology, as well as determining whether your subnets are appropriately organized for your business needs. For example, it can determine whether a subnet is full, which could cause issues when you try to then assign new IPs into it. This allows for better capacity planning, enabling you to routinely audit your IP space and determine whether you need new blocks of IPs for additional subnets. It also allows you to split up network and IP address management by role, so each of your teams can work independently to manage their own subnets, address blocks, and DHCP and DNS services.

For global or widely spread international companies, the ease of using IPAM for automation and control of these subnets removes a huge amount of administrative overhead. All this is included in customizable dashboards, which makes IP Address Manager easy and intuitive to use. As I mentioned before, when looking to improve network bandwidth, mapping the topography of your network is vitally important.

Knowing what kind of devices are on your network, as well as key information about them, is an important step toward discovering network bandwidth issues and troubleshooting them.

UDT can drill down to gather further information about these devices, including port status and usage, response time, packet loss, CPU load, and memory utilization, to build a picture of your network functionality.

If bandwidth issues are stemming from an unusual device, UDT may be able to help you find it. It can also find switches operating at capacity or almost at capacity and help you reclaim unused ports. Overall, it allows you to forecast potential issues, or reshuffle communications endpoints to allow better bandwidth performance.

Using these tools can be an extremely helpful and thorough approach to detecting and fixing network bandwidth issues. With a wide range of supported technologies, PRTG monitors every aspect of your IT infrastructure, including applications, bandwidth, traffic, packets, virtual and on-premises environments, network uptime, and cloud services, as well as ports, hardware and IoT devices, web services and disk usage, and security.

It offers different interfaces and is compatible with Windows and Mac. PRTG comes with powerful monitoring tools, including real-time maps to display live status information for all your network metrics. You can also use PRTG map designer to create topology maps of your network, which is useful for establishing an overview of what your network looks like.

This tool is a manual one and using it to map your network can be time consuming. This can help relevant staff to see how the network is performing, so bottlenecks or performance issues can be quickly identified and fixed. PRTG also offers a broad range of alerting mechanisms, including email and push alerts, audio files, and custom alerts and notification triggers. PRTG Network Monitor is an excellent option for a new business looking to start monitoring its network and bandwidth but may not be suitable for much larger enterprises with complex networks.

With a suite of products intended for network and mobile application management, ManageEngine tools are primarily intended for enterprise mobility management focusing on wireless networks and mobile devices and other mobile computing issues. OpManager has broad monitoring scope: it looks at hardware including routers, servers, switches, printers, and storage devices, as well as wireless LAN controllers, firewalls, load balancers, VMs, and all other devices connected to your network.

You can also view the network performance hop by hop to pinpoint the location of any problems. OpManager primarily focuses on things affecting network performance, including availability, CPU and memory, traffic, errors, and WAN performance.

ManageEngine also offers NetFlow Analyzer, a tool specifically intended for monitoring and optimizing network bandwidth and traffic, rather than for broader network monitoring. Beyond collecting and analyzing data on bandwidth, NetFlow Analyzer lets you generate reports on network and bandwidth activity using customizable criteria, as well as to generate multiple reports and then compare them.

It also creates bandwidth growth reports, including long-term reporting, which you can use for capacity planning and to track abnormal activity. This can help you ensure your network is handling your current traffic well, and to stay one step ahead of growth, reducing the likelihood of outages. In addition, it equips you to spot unusual bandwidth growth or network anomalies indicative of a security issue.

NetFlow Analyzer is available for Windows and Linux, and you can use some of its features and reports on both iPhone and Android. It includes two editions: Essential and Enterprise. Like other IP address management tools, it can determine which IP addresses are in use and which need to be reclaimed, as well as identify and manage subnets.

It can also identify rogue devices on the network, along with all the bandwidth your devices and interfaces are using, to help you quickly identify which parts of your network are hogging bandwidth.

OpUtils uses SNMP to fetch the bandwidth utilization details of a network interface and provides information in real time. In addition to reporting on historical trends of bandwidth use on your network, it can provide bandwidth monitoring reports and graphs, so you can easily measure how your network has been performing over time and how it looks now.

WhatsUp Gold by Ipswitch provides a complete network monitoring solution. It encompasses monitoring of users, applications, and protocols consuming bandwidth; application performance monitoring; and virtualization monitoring and configuration management. Regarding network traffic analysis, having insight into bandwidth consumption allows you to more easily manage your overall infrastructure, services, and applications.

It also helps you ensure you have an adequate bandwidth for critical business services. Drawing on these insights, you can create bandwidth usage policies and alerts for capacity planning and maximize your return on ISP costs by optimizing your bandwidth. WhatsUp Gold can help you to reprioritize activities consuming a disproportionate amount of bandwidth and identify illegitimate bandwidth hogs that should be prevented from accessing your network.

It includes reporting capabilities, so you can easily see various aspects of your network performance, as well as mapping tools for visualizing your core, Windows, wireless, and virtual infrastructures.

The tool does have its drawbacks. In addition, the web interface could be improved, as it runs slowly on dynamic or complex network setups. The last two tools on this list are for those readers looking for something free or open-source.

These free open-source tools are more limited than premium tools, and while they might suffice for home or small business users, larger enterprises will want to look into more robust solutions.