Then vendors such as Cisco and Nortel added software to their routers and switches designed to monitor quality of service and prioritize traffic. For some companies?including Fenwick & West?these router and switch-based solutions worked fine. But for others, such as Charter Communications, a St. Louis-based provider of broadband services in St. Louis, the value-added features on switches and routers required more memory, more processing power within the router or switch, and even an entire hardware upgrade.

Today’s trafficking and monitoring tools perform quality of service analysis on packets of data at the application layer. This allows network services directors, such as Charter Communications’ Floyd Jochimsen, to guarantee bandwidth for certain applications and protocols. Jochimsen uses PacketShaper, a bandwidth management appliance from Packeteer. PacketShaper increases the amount of usable bandwidth on any given circuit by identifying everything that’s running on the network and then analyzing how much bandwidth each user or application is absorbing. The product then dynamically adjusts the performance of applications based on controls the CIO establishes for when the network gets congested. When an employee tries to download music from Napster, for example, he might find it takes ages?if it runs at all?while a video conferencing application gets the bandwidth it needs to run smoothly.

Using PacketShaper, Jochimsen says he decreased the cost of his network by 50 percent.

PacketShaper includes tools for network monitoring and analysis. Before deploying a caching solution or a bandwidth management appliance, CIOs must first audit their network to find out what’s running on it. Experts agree that while most companies know what authorized applications are running on their network, they have no idea what unauthorized programs are also sucking up bandwidth and slowing down performance. "Very often, people find a lot of unimportant traffic like Napster on their very expensive, congested links. At colleges and universities, Napster and its ilk consume 80 percent to 90 percent of available bandwidth. The numbers are less than that at most corporations, but everybody has the problem whether they know it or not," says Czubek.

And since it’s hard for IT to prohibit savvy users from downloading unauthorized applications, CIOs have to take a proactive approach to bandwidth management using these tools. At Fenwick & West, Kesner is prioritizing traffic on his company’s network using quality of service tools on his switches. He’s also improved throughput by installing multiple network interface cards on his servers, and he’s using Peribit devices on WAN links to increase the available bandwidth between the firm’s offices. Kesner says the Peribit boxes he deployed gave him control over outside bandwidth needs that he never had before. "I’m saving thousands of dollars a month because I didn’t have to increase our bandwidth on two of our WAN links because of Peribit," says Kesner. n