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The Growth of Real-time Applications
According to a recent ComputerWorld Survey, Voice over IP (VoIP) and video streaming are two of the fastest growing applications in the enterprise. These, and other real-time applications that leverage UDP, currently account for 27% of Enterprise WAN traffic, and are expected to grow significantly over the coming years.
Multimedia applications can present numerous challenges for distributed enterprises. For example:
- Video on Demand, streaming video and audio streaming are sensitive to jitter and packet loss.
- Both on-demand video and streaming video consume substantial bandwidth. This can quickly fill up the entire WAN link, severely limiting scalability of services and the number of concurrent sessions.
- VoIP is highly sensitive to jitter, packet loss and latency, even though it uses nominal bandwidth.
The Silver Peak Solution
Most real-time applications use UDP, not TCP, as a transport protocol. As a result, they are not significantly addressed by TCP-only acceleration solutions.
Silver Peak is the only network acceleration platform that works at the network layer, addressing all enterprise applications, including multimedia services that leverage UDP. While other solutions simply reduce bandwidth usage to "make room" for voice and other real-time services, Silver Peak enhances the actual delivery of these applications. This is done in several ways:
- Multicast with Network Memory. Silver Peak eliminates the transfer of duplicate information across the WAN. This includes video broadcasts, audio streaming, voicemail distribution, and other repetitive multimedia traffic. Once the initial traffic stream traverses the WAN, Network Memory eliminates the transfer of video content over the WAN for all additional streams. For example, if 100 clients in an office are accessing a video stream, the first video stream is transferred and the remaining 99 sessions are eliminated, reducing network traffic by 99x.
- QoS is used to prioritize traffic and guarantee appropriate bandwidth to groom traffic as it enters the WAN. This reduces jitter and latency, enabling time-sensitive applications like VoIP to be deployed in conjunction with other enterprise traffic..
- Silver Peak appliances perform all optimizations in real time, introducing little or no additional latency when handling multimedia traffic. Alternative "acceleration" solutions often add 10 ms of latency or more, causing added impairment rather than improving real-time applications.
- Forward Error Correction (“FEC”) protects traffic from packet loss due to network congestion, eliminating ‘service brownouts’ throughout the day when running all enterprise traffic. This enables real-time applications to be run over the public Internet.
- Header compression further reduces the amount of bandwidth used by VoIP and other real-time applications.
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