Traffic Shaping - Enterprises

Enterprises

Traffic Shaping and also prioritization are becoming more and more common in the corporate market. Most companies with remote offices are now connected via a Wide area network (WAN). Applications tend to become centrally hosted at the head office and remote offices are expected to pull data from central databases and server farms. As applications become more hungry in terms of bandwidth and prices of dedicated circuits being relatively high in most areas of the world, instead of increasing the size of their WAN circuits, companies feel the need to properly manage their circuits to make sure business-oriented traffic gets priority over best-effort traffic. Traffic shaping is thus a good means for companies to avoid purchasing additional bandwidth while properly managing these resources.

Alternatives to traffic shaping in this regards are application acceleration and WAN optimization and compression, which are fundamentally different from traffic shaping. Traffic shaping defines bandwidth rules (or partitions as some vendors call them) whereas application acceleration using multiple techniques like a TCP Performance Enhancing Proxy. WAN optimization and compression (WOC) on the other hand would use compression and differential algorithms and techniques to compress data streams or send only differences in file updates. The latter is quite effective for chatty protocols like CIFS.