IT Wise, the Sub-Saharan distributor for Packeteer, today announced that leading accounting firm Ernst & Young Australia has purchased solutions from the latter that will provide it with the ability to shape traffic and compress data in real-time to implement 6 000 new voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phone lines without increasing the bandwidth on its wide area network.
Ernst & Young operates offices in all Australian capital cities except Darwin, plus an office on Queensland`s Gold Coast. To link those offices and provide access to business applications, e-mail and the Internet, the company operates a wide area network.
A 34Mbps link connects the Melbourne and Sydney offices, 6Mbps links are provided to Perth and Brisbane and other offices use 4Mbps links. With the exception of 2Mbps upgrades to Perth and Brisbane, this bandwidth has remained static since the company first adopted Packeteer in 2000, implementing its traffic shaping technology.
The purchase of additional Packeteer devices at branch offices has allowed Ernst & Young to implement compression solutions resulting in further bandwidth efficiencies. Packeteer`s ability to combine traffic shaping with the compression of data in real-time has meant the WAN`s capacity has remained static even though the company has now introduced 6 000 VOIP lines and IP video conferencing between all eight offices.
"Without something like Packeteer, I believe we would need two or three times the current bandwidth to obtain comparable performance and utilisation," explained Stephen Arnold, Ernst & Young Australia`s chief information officer.
"Without Packeteer`s control you inevitably end up making compromises about the performance of applications and merely have to accept that some applications will not behave or properly coexist with other systems.
"Our time sheet entry tool, for example, is considered more important than Web browsing," continued Arnold. "Packeteer is our tool to determine performance criteria for each application. We need to make sure that we can provide the right end-user experience and the right performance."
Packeteer`s ability enforces quality of service policies before transmission over the WAN has been a key feature that enabled the company to implement these performance criteria.
"We realised that time sensitive applications like VOIP and the video over IP service we use for internal video conferencing make it even more important to be in control of the network," added Arnold. "So when we implemented VOIP we added Packeteer solutions to every node of the network."
The Packeteer devices are now used to recognise VOIP traffic and give it priority access over the WAN.
"The start-up phase of a session is when you get the most problems," continued Arnold. "In our initial setup we had just one Packeteer in Sydney, but by adding their products to every office we can establish every session and maintain it to deliver the level of service a voice call or video conference demands. The other plus in using Packeteer at every node has been to let us introduce compression across the network to further reduce bandwidth consumption.
"We were lucky that we already had a lot of experience controlling quality of service, so when we started doing voice and video over IP it was not hard to determine what we needed to get the best possible performance."
Packeteer has also made the Ernst & Young`s IT department more responsive to its end-users. "They are aware that we can manage applications," said Arnold. "If they have performance problems, they know they can explain the issue and we can deliver what they are expecting.
"The way I explained it to the business when we first bought Packeteer was to say that our previous tools were like driving through a tunnel with no lights on: you don`t know what traffic is ahead of you or behind you," concluded Arnold. "Now we can set speed limits, set up rules and data will observe the rules of the road. We wouldn`t be without it any more, especially since our move to VOIP."
For further information, please contact Brian Paul at telephone (012) 665 2204; fax (012) 665 2918; e-mail brian@itwise.co.za.
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