CTO Matt Kesner says that the transfer of so many large files over the network causes other applications to time out, and his users can’t stand getting disconnected when they need documents to prepare last-minute presentations for clients and prospects. "We have people working in the middle of the night and they expect fast connections, reliable connections 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he says.

For three years, Kesner addressed his bandwidth problems by upgrading his WAN connections from a single T1 line to multiple T1 lines and his LAN connection to Gigabit Ethernet. But each time he increased bandwidth, users sucked it up.

"No matter how much bandwidth you provide to users, they’re going to want more," says Donald Czubek, president of Gen2 Ventures, a quality of service management analyst firm based in San Jose, Calif.

Bottlenecks that slow down the entire network arise where information running over the speedy corporate LAN meets the slower corporate WANs. And while LAN connectivity is inexpensive, WAN connectivity isn’t. In fact, for some IT executives, WAN connectivity accounts for as much as 20 percent of their budget. With their wallets shrinking, CIOs are looking for places to cut and casting glances toward networking costs. The problem is, they have to decrease their costs without further degrading service. Fortunately, there is a host of low-cost, low-maintenance hardware- and software-based solutions to the bandwidth conundrum?from vendors such as Cacheflow, Digital Fountain, Expand Networks, Packeteer, Peribit Networks and Sitara Networks?that many CIOs are deploying, with amazing results.

Fast Fixes

When organizations don’t have enough bandwidth, the performance of mission-critical applications deteriorates. For example, Redwood City, Calif.-based BroadVision customers had to wait up to two minutes to report any problems they had with the vendor’s enterprise self-service software, while customer service representatives on the other end of the phone line tried to access the event-management system to open a trouble ticket, according to CIO Shawn Farshchi.

Meanwhile, employees in BroadVision’s finance department would get kicked off the ERP system because the financial applications took so long to respond over the WAN. So last September, Farshchi installed hardware from Peribit, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup, on each end of his WAN. The VCR-sized SR-50 server reduces the number of bytes transmitted across a link by finding patterns in packets of data and encoding them in more efficient sequences, says Amit Singh, Peribit’s cofounder and chief scientist.