IP Traffic Management for Educational Institutions

Dyband helps educational institutions reduce connectivity costs, while delivering more consistent, reliable access services to all users, and guaranteeing priority bandwidth to dedicated critical applications and vital groups.

The Challenge: Monitoring, controlling and predicting bandwidth usage in the academic environment.

Access challenges in the educational environment are unique. Academic users are bandwidth hungry, and different interest groups have distinct bandwidth requirements and priorities-at different times of the day. Administration needs fast reliable access for on-line registration, while university researchers require priority access to the latest research data and students need consistent access, both on campus and in residence, for class work and entertainment. This leaves administrators, researchers, faculty, staff and students all competing for the same limited bandwidth. Critical applications and groups must have priority, yet you can't "starve" lower priority users.

All the while, there is pressure from administration to keep the cost of connectivity down. Some institutions buy as much bandwidth as they can afford, recognizing it is not sufficient to handle peak utilization, and then restrict access to applications as one way to manage usage. (Institutions are concerned about the threat of with lawsuits for restricting access to applications.) Other institutions provision bandwidth to meet peak demand and bear the high cost of an underutilized network.

Without adequate visibility into network usage, the best network administrators can do is guess at the needs of their users. How can they determine how much bandwidth is enough? How do they calculate daily peak traffic periods or find out which users or systems are generating the bulk of the traffic load? Tools like MRTG can provide some visibility, but reports on individual users would take hours or days to run.

Now, there's a better way. Dyband intelligent bandwidth management can give educational institutions absolute control of their bandwidth through unique monitoring, management and visibility tools. Dyband delivers a significant improvement in bandwidth utilization that can increase an institution's productivity and lower costs, all while giving users what they need - consistent, reliable high speed access.

The Solution: Dyband

Dyband's intelligent traffic management solution enables educational institutions to control bandwidth consumption, by IP address, for up to 50,000 managed points-individuals, groups, subnets, and/or gateways. Multiple allocation schemes (e.g., guaranteed, preferred, equitable) distribute available bandwidth across all managed points during both normal and congested conditions.

Dyband evaluates the bandwidth capacity/demand ratio 100 times per second, regardless of traffic load, and dynamically shapes individual and aggregate bandwidth usage based on traffic conditions. This minimizes network congestion, reduces packet loss, and optimizes Internet backbone utilization.

The Dyband software also allows educational institutions to define and manage a virtually unlimited number of service levels so that dedicated critical applications like on-line registration or vital departments such as administration, have the bandwidth and priority they need.

Dyband enables new visibility into bandwidth consumption, allowing network administrators to make real-time usage decisions, and gather comprehensive historical statistics for capacity analysis, usage-based billing or departmental charge-backs, and technical/customer support.

Studies based on live customer use have shown that educational institutions can recoup their investment in Dyband within six months.

The Benefits of Dyband at a Glance

• Guarantees that dedicated critical applications and vital departments or groups have the bandwidth and priority they need. Give specific groups and applications priority access during peak hours, and allow students priority access during non-peak hours.

• Eliminates the need to restrict the use of specific applications, such as peer-to-peer applications.
• Delivers more consistent, reliable service to all users, regardless of their priority or bandwidth classification.

• Reduces operating costs.

• Eliminates the need to provision bandwidth to meet peak demand.

• Delivers better utilization of your current connection. Add up to 25% more users to the network without adding more bandwidth.

• Minimizes network congestion, reduces packet loss and eliminates congestion-related outages.

• Monitors who is using bandwidth, at what rate, and when. Allows an administrator to adjust the usage of individuals or groups, in real time. Collects historical statistics for later analysis.

Dyband Components and The Network Fit

The network diagram in Figure 1 depicts the Dyband solution deployed in an academic network. The solution comprises several components: The Shaper, CMon, Archiver, Miner and Profile Push.

The Shaper is installed between the distribution network and Internet router. It is responsible for shaping Internet traffic and collecting real-time statistics. Since the Shaper has no user interface, a separate application, CMon, is used to configure and manage the Shaper. With CMon, the network administrator can view and modify the topology of managed objects, manage service profiles and view real-time statistics. ProfilePush distributes global profiles to remote Shapers. Archiver extracts real-time statistics from one or more Shapers and stores them in an ODBC database, and the Miner application enables network administrators to generate and view reports that contain historical performance data. And, the software allows essential operational status information to be monitored by existing network management platforms via SNMP.

The Dyband solution is easy to install and runs on industry-standard hardware platforms with a Pentium processor or equivalent, 500 MHz or higher, and operating systems such as Red Hat Linux 6.2 to 7.1, and Windows 2000 and NT.

Dyband IPTM Availability

The Dyband solution is available today in a broad range of configurations that scale to meet the needs of educational institutions-from 1 Mbps to 155 Mbps of managed bandwidth per Dyband unit. Prices for the Dyband start at $850 USD and are dependent on the aggregate amount of bandwidth managed by the Dyband solution.