Anagran Total Bandwidth Management
Anagran provides Total Bandwidth Management through our unique Intelligent Flow Delivery (IFD)™ technology. You can:
- deliver perfect voice and video traffic with guaranteed zero packet drop, even over highly-congested links
- protect mission-critical data with perfect delivery even in a congested network
- dramatically improve users' network browsing experience and similar tasks, with no increase in bandwidth
- control non-critical and recreational traffic, so it uses only bandwidth not needed for anything else
- detect and control peer-to-peer and other "greedy" applications, limiting them to their fair share of the network's resources - or even less if you want
- identify applications through their behavior even if they try to hide behind another application's identity
...and all this with simple, policy-based configuration - no need to keep tweaking the configuration as traffic details change.
How is this possible? At the heart of the FR-1000, Fast Flow Technology™ associates every packet with a flow, and with every packet measures the flow's real-time bandwidth usage, comparing it to a target value. At the same time, the bandwidth in use is constantly measured, and used to calculate new flow targets. Anagran's unique algorithms ensure that bandwidth is given to critical applications and traffic. Whatever is left is shared out among less important traffic, which acts as a kind of shock-absorber, keeping the link full yet without harming the critical traffic.
Other Quality-of-Service implementations rely on queueing, which mixes up traffic from many different flows then regulates traffic by randomly discarding packets, without regard to which flow or application they relate to. Use of queues brings two serious problems:
huge variation in response time, for the same transfer. The picture to the right shows the time taken to transfer a fixed-size file, over many transfers - to the left without Anagran, and to the right with Anagran. The average transfer time is the same in both cases - but the user's experience depends on the worst case, not the average. So Anagran increases the user's satisfaction with the network by a factor of 3 or more, for no increase in the available bandwidth- queues are an indirect way to control network utilization. Setting the QoS parameters of a queue-based system requres a lot of trial and error, and is very sensitive to even slight changes in the traffic mix. Giving reliable service to voice and video, without wasting a lot of bandwidth, takes constant adjustment as well as highly-skilled operators - which translates to a lot of expense to the network operator
Anagran Total Bandwidth Management solves all of these problems, providing full use of bandwidth, high-quality delivery of critical services, and low management overhead.