Exinda Unified Performance Management

Visibility:

Before you can begin to control your WAN and optimize application performance, you need visibility into what is happening across your network. Gaining a clear view of the network is no simple task. Recreational applications including P2P applications may attempt to mask their identity and behavior. User complaints about slow applications can also be highly subjective.

The Exinda Unified Performance Management solution helps you keep an eye on bandwidth utilization, troubleshoot application performance issues and identify network abuse. With real-time monitoring, reporting and analysis, Exinda provides the visibility you need to monitor and classify network traffic, measure application response times and perform in-depth analysis to support performance optimization and capacity planning.

Key Features and Benefits:

• Monitor application performance issues in real time and take immediate action
• Precisely monitor bandwidth utilization by user group or individual user.
• Objectively measure application response times and quickly troubleshoot issues
• Accurately classify all network traffic using advanced Layer 7 analysis
• Detect evasive applications like P2P with deep-level inspection and behavior monitoring
• Run historical reports for advanced trending and capacity planning

Control:

Visibility helps you understand how your WAN is being used, but you still need the ability to effectively manage the network. To maximize resources and meet user expectations for fast access to applications, you need precise control over traffic. You must also weigh legitimate business needs against your users’ right to open Internet access. This may require P2P control and recreational traffic control that is as non-intrusive to users as possible.

The Exinda Unified Performance Management solution includes advanced policy-based traffic management and control. With Exinda, you can share available bandwidth among various users, groups and applications while restricting unwanted traffic. To keep low-priority traffic from interfering with WAN performance and application response times, Exinda allows you to detect evasive applications, limit the bandwidth allotted to P2P traffic or eliminate some types of recreational traffic altogether.

Key Features and Benefits:

• Control network traffic without placing heavy-handed restrictions on users
• Reduce congestion and conserve bandwidth by limiting or eliminating recreational traffic
• Detect applications that are designed to be evasive using Layer 7 application signatures
• Implement and automatically maintain a fair use policy for network resources
• Automatically change network behavior based on user-defined events and triggers
• Centrally manage network resources and set policies using a single intuitive interface

Optimization:

WAN optimization is about getting every bit of performance out of your network. To make the most of available resources, you need to continually measure application performance and proactively adjust network behavior.

When faced with performance issues, some organizations simply throw more bandwidth at the problem. This costly approach treats the symptoms of the problem without resolving its underlying causes. Similarly, some organizations invest in solutions that accelerate all network traffic including the good and the bad – recreational P2P traffic, low-priority applications, etc.

The Exinda Unified Performance Management solution combines sophisticated traffic optimization with intelligent acceleration. Exinda’s unique WAN optimization solution provides detailed application classification and prioritization, granular policy-based traffic control and selective TCP and application acceleration. With Exinda, you can dramatically improve application response times, increase traffic throughput and reduce the effects of latency. The result is near LAN-like application performance across your WAN.

Key Features and Benefits:

• Prioritize applications based on their importance to your business operations
• Guarantee that critical applications get the bandwidth they need (e.g. VoIP or CRM)
• Selectively speed up traffic with intelligent TCP, CIFS and HTTP acceleration
• Increase workforce productivity by ensuring predictable application performance
• Defer costly bandwidth upgrades by maximizing current network resources
• Increase network connection speeds and overall network performance

Key Features:

 

Visibility: Bandwidth Management	Control: Bandwidth Utilization	Performance: BandWidth Optimization
Real-time Monitoring Gain real-time visibility into network activity with bandwidth management in order to identify performance issues as they are happening and rapidly troubleshoot your network. Alerts, warning and email notifications inform administrators of configuration errors, NIC drops and transmit/receive errors. Rich Reporting View summary reports of network activity or drill down for a more detailed granular view in order to pinpoint areas of concern on the network. Summarize and categorize peer-to-peer (P2P) and recreational traffic to determine how much time and data is being spent on non-business activities. Library of Pre-built Reports An extensive collection of out-of-the-box report templates means you can spend less time and effort building reports, freeing up valuable resources to focus on more critical tasks. Automatic Report Delivery Automatically generate and distribute reports via email to customers, users and stakeholders to keep them informed of key metrics that are important to your organization. Deliver reports in PDF format or in a format suitable for import into existing business intelligence applications for further analysis. Historical Reporting Run reports to identify trends in network usage and to support capacity planning. See how network usage has grown over time to better predict when you will need to add more bandwidth. Select custom reporting timeframes to align with business cycles, e.g. university terms, semesters, billing cycles or fiscal quarters. Microsoft® Active Directory Integration Integration with Microsoft Active Directory provides fine-grained visibility into network usage by mapping all network traffic to an Active Directory user name. Monitor traffic in real-time by user name and IP address, run reports by individual user and set optimization policies by user or user group for precise control. Application Identification Accurately identify application traffic on your network through deep-level inspection, Layer 7 packet classification and behavior monitoring. Application Response Measurement Objectively measure the response times of any application on your network and quickly troubleshoot network performance issues that are impeding application response and impacting the user experience.	Service Delivery Point (SDP) Centrally manage all Exinda appliances on your network using an intuitive Web-based interface for bandwidth utilization. Gain visibility across your network and simplify network management tasks including policy-setting and firmware updates. Fair Sharing Easily allocate specific amounts or percentages of bandwidth to individual users, user groups or sub-nets to ensure that no single user or host can monopolize your bandwidth. Policy-based traffic Management Control bandwidth utilization by limiting or eliminating unwanted network traffic such as P2P or other recreational traffic. Prevent low-priority traffic from interfering with the performance of your WAN or impeding response times for critical applications. Evasive Application Traffic Detection Layer 7 application signatures, behavior monitoring and advanced heuristics allow network administrators to detect and control applications that are designed to be evasive such as P2P and file sharing applications. Adaptive Response Automatically change the behavior of your network based on certain user-defined events and triggers. Set policies that allow your network to adapt to changing traffic conditions without requiring manual intervention.	Guarantee Bandwidth Ensure that your business-critical applications have sufficient bandwidth available when and as needed. With bandwidth optimization, you can increase productivity and improve the user experience by ensuring consistent response times and performance for the applications running on your WAN. Prioritization Set the priority of applications and allocate bandwidth accordingly. Should a bottleneck occur, your network can logically prioritize traffic to ensure that your most critical applications have the bandwidth they need. Intelligent Acceleration Improve application performance and reduce latency with a combination of TCP acceleration and application acceleration (CIFS, MAPI and HTTP). Selectively accelerate traffic based on an understanding of your users, applications and business needs. Advanced Caching Improve response times and lower bandwidth utilization by caching frequently accessed links and sending only changed data across the network. The Exinda cache is dynamically provisioned in real-time based on the requirements of each branch office or location. Caching for small data blocks improves the performance for applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Oracle Forms. Persistent Cache retains WAN memory even if the Exinda appliance is rebooted to ensure consistent acceleration performance. Differentiated Services Support Give precedence to selected traffic types according to the Diffserv standard and pass this prioritization information along to other networking devices to improve overall Quality of Service (QoS). Seamlessly interoperate with MPLS networks to maximize traffic flow. Scheduling Your network experiences peaks and valleys in traffic throughout the day. A smart scheduling mechanism allows you to change the behavior of your network based on time of day and traffic flow, ensuring bandwidth optimization. Schedule periodic tasks such as backups for off-peak times when bandwidth utilization is low.

UPM Definition:

The Productivity Gap:

Falling bandwidth costs and communications technology advances have driven an exponential growth in the usage of Wide Area Networks (WANs), including the Internet as the world’s greatest and most accessed WAN.

Growth in the available WAN & Internet pipes capacities and speeds though have not been able to keep up with business usage.

This has created a yawning Productivity GAP between business demand & the network’s inability to supply. The costs of lost staff productivity, defined by Exinda as the “Time Waiting At Screen” factor or “TWAS factor”, dwarf the savings generated by lower bandwidth costs today.

See Unified Performance Management: Brochure - The Productivity Gap

The TWAS Factor:

The "Time Waiting At Screen" factor is a measure of how much time is spent by users waiting at the screen for applications to respond. Even a 10 minute per day TWAS factor can represent over one million dollars in lost employee productivity per annum for an organization of 500 employees. Reducing the TWAS factor delivers competitive advantages, cost savings and better customer service to organizations.

 

 

UPM FAQs:

1. What is Exinda's Unified Performance Management (UPM)?

"Having recognized that application acceleration is not enough, Exinda has created UPM."

Unified Performance Management (UPM) is a new benchmark that defines the components required to effectively manage the performance of a wide breadth of applications that organizations use to do their business across Wide Area Networks (WANs), including the Internet. It incorporates all facets of WAN optimization, application acceleration, application visibility, application response time measurements and a ubiquitous global management facility. UPM fulfils both the technical and commercial requirements for a broad and scalable market adoption. UPM: the ubiquitous availability of all WAN acceleration functionality to every user on every network globally.

2. Who can benefit from Exinda's UPM? How?

All organizations that have IT-based communications beyond their LAN boundaries, whether via WAN or Internet, will benefit from the comprehensive, integrated optimization and acceleration technology solution that only UPM delivers. Small, medium and large companies can benefit from the high employee productivity gains, improved customer service and reduced network infrastructure costs that result from enhanced network performance. UPM also helps companies realize the full benefits of server consolidation, converged networks, thin client and remote access initiatives.

3. How big is the market and how fast is it growing?

Many sources have tried to size the market. According to IDC's Worldwide Optimization Management 2005-2009 Forecast and Analysis, the 2004 revenue for WAN optimization products was projected to grow to US $611 million by 2009. More recent analysis such as those from Cisco and others are quoting figures of $14 billion to $20 billion. Exinda believes the revenue in 2009 will be at least $4 billion. Exinda's UPM creates a new, distinctive technology category. While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact size of the UPM market, it is safe to say that the market is significantly larger than the WAN optimization controller and application acceleration markets combined. As businesses comes to fully understand its compelling ROI and cost/benefits ratio, UPM will be widely adopted and change the future of IP networking.

4. How is Exinda's UPM different than the competition? How long will Exinda's UPM outpace the competition?

Exinda's UPM is the only comprehensive, fully integrated offering on the market today. UPM creates the new benchmark for optimizing WAN and Internet business communications. Competitors' products fall short of providing a complete solution for network performance and productivity improvements. Exinda is positioned as the catalyst for the wide scale adoption of a single, ubiquitous solution with global scalability and management capabilities. With the appropriate R&D investment, Exinda will sustain these key differentiators for two to three years.

5. How does Exinda business model capitalize on this market opportunity?

As a progressive start-up company, Exinda is the first company to integrate and disseminate UPM. Exinda's business model addresses all aspects of the inevitable migration from IP communications to a more performance-based model where demand for WAN optimization controllers (WOC) and application acceleration technologies will grow for several years to come. UPM addresses global businesses' needs for higher employee productivity and reduced business costs. Our global distribution model, follow-the-sun technical support and superior technology position Exinda for leadership in the UPM market. With low overheads, Exinda has priced UPM to be affordable for the masses and compelling for the enterprises.

6. How does Exinda intend to sustain its competitive edge as the market shifts to UPM?

While the competition scrambles to catch up to Exinda's fully integrated UPM model, Exinda will be delivering a globally scalable and ubiquitous central management system for UPM. It will take time for the competition to integrate all the UPM technologies they are missing onto a single platform and even more time to reduce costs to bring their pricing structure in alignment with Exinda's highly afford UPM solution. Continued innovation driven by market-smart product management and fuelled by constant leading edge R&D will continue developing UPM and deliver Exinda and Exinda Partners competitive edge into the future.

7. When is Exinda's Unified Performance Management available? How much does it cost?

Exinda's UPM is available today on all its x800 appliances. The costs range from as low as US $1,000 for branch offices to $40,000 for data center solutions. The Exinda x800s are complete UPM platforms. The Exinda x700s are a component of UPM for the end user with only WAN optimization requirements.

8. Where can I get Exinda's Unified Performance Management?

Exinda's UPM solutions are available through qualified resellers and network integrators. To find a partner in your area, visit Exinda Partners.

9. How quickly can a typical company achieve a return on investment for purchasing UPM?

Remarkably, a typical company can achieve a return on its investment in UPM in approximately 12.5 days. The costs for the UPM solution are quickly recuperated in increased employee productivity, improved customer service and deferred network infrastructure costs.