Is Network Downtime Killing Your Company? (Tips For Traffic Management And Minimizing Downtime)

As businesses become increasingly dependent on the Internet and web applications to conduct business, they are also faced with the challenge of managing network resources needed for these applications.  Whether an organization has an e-commerce site relying on web applications for revenue, or is a service organization dependent on information delivered through web applications, constant and continuous availability is a major concern.

The basic problem is simple: If a website or a hosted application crashes or is very slow to respond, customers become frustrated and leave the site.  Moreover, companies do not want to be placed in the position of having customers and users complain about a site, especially if the IT department is not aware that there are any accessibility problems.  That could mean literally millions of dollars flying out the window.

Downtime can kill a company, and always seems to come at the worst possible time, so knowing and understanding your application traffic usage can help prevent future headaches when the traffic spikes or changes.  The following questions are designed to help IT managers reduce downtime:

1. Do you understand how your site is used?  What kind of a web application do you have?  A web store?  Delivery of media or rich content?  Remote web access to corporate applications?   Are there certain times of the day or year when traffic spikes e.g. do you run sales? What type of content do you have on your site, i.e. are there many videos to be downloaded or is content mainly simple text?  All of these tasks will generate different kinds of traffic patterns and will require different infrastructure deployment strategies.  There are a number of network monitoring tools available today to help a site administrator gain an in-depth understanding of both, current and future site usage.
2. How many servers do you have?  At a certain point in traffic, you will need to add servers, but unless traffic is managed across servers, you haven’t gained much. Traffic management can be accomplished with an intelligent device that manages the traffic behind-the-scenes to direct the traffic reliably.  There are options available that are hardware-based or implemented via software if you are choosing a virtual environment, with costs ranging under $2,000 for either the hardware or software versions.  Using application delivery controllers (ADCs), traffic can be distributed across two or more servers through a series of load balancing algorithms and content switching rules, in order to place traffic on the best performing servers.  .
3. Where are your servers?  Web sites can crash for many reasons. For example increased traffic, a denial of service attack on the site, a power outage, or perhaps a failure with the server or switch being used.  Consider if you want all your servers in one location or have two or more locations with additional application servers.  If one site becomes too slow or unavailable altogether the other site   can pick up the application traffic from the failed or slow site, allowing your online business to continue to operate..
4. Does your application require “stickiness”?  Most transactional-type applications store “session state” or other application data for some period of time – before it is moved to the database backend.  Server or session persistence sends a given user to the same server for the duration of that “session”, maintaining a positive and consistent user experience.  For example, an online shopping cart requires persistence so that the client can connect to the same web server for the duration of the session without losing the information that has been placed in the cart. 
5. Will one server cover for another?  If a server becomes inaccessible, the ADC has the intelligence to take that problem device off-line and re-route traffic to the remaining servers.  This is called failover and involves advanced health checking capabilities that can determine when a server is unavailable or under-performing, and direct traffic to another server.  This way all of an organization’s applications can achieve mission-critical availability while ultimately reducing operational costs and complexity.

Servers have to handle large amounts of data, and with current networks, bottlenecks can occur during high traffic times, slowing down sites and hosted applications.  For businesses, these snafus could mean lost customers and reduced productivity.  Proper traffic management includes detecting data traffic spikes and re-directing that traffic to less busy servers while optimizing the performance of applications to avoid questions over whether downtime is killing your company.