WestJet's William Lee helps keep fares low by using an intelligent application delivery appliance for WAN traffic over an MPLS network. Growth is good, but WestJet airlines found that growing was beginning to threaten its low fares-based business model. Faced with a costly upgrade for its WAN services enterprise- wide, the airline's manager of technical infrastructure had a hunch there must be a better, more cost-effective alternative. He was right.

WestJet is a Canadian low-cost airline offering scheduled service throughout its 47-city North American and Caribbean network. Named Canada's most admired corporate culture in 2005,2006 and 2007, Westjet pioneered low-cost flying in Canada.

The airline has grown rapidly since 1996 when it commenced flight operations with 220 employees and three planes serving three destinations. Westjet now has more than 7,000 employees, and operates a fleet of 74 next-generation Boeing 737s that serve 47 destinations in Canada, the United States and the Bahamas.

By beginning its operations on a small scale, Westjet was able to control costs throughout the company, and the IT department was no exception. For its first full decade in business, the airline was able to employ a cost-effective Frame Relay network service to link its data center with the growing number of hubs and terminals.

"When I heard about systems that offered intelligent bandwidth management resulting in superior application performance and an extraordinarily high return on investment. I was more than a little skeptical," says WestJet's William Lee.

In 2006, William Lee, WestJet's manager of technical infrastructure, recognized the need to manage WAN bandwidth more effectively. "The Frame Relay network served our needs quite well for quite a while," he says. "But as we grew and added a redundant data center, the network became too complex and costly."

Which is why Lee decided to replace the company's Frame Relay network with a multiprotocol layer switching (MPLS) service.

With its support for multiple classes of service in a secure, point-to-multipoint topology, MPLS seemed to be the ideal solution for WestJet's growing number of users and applications. Of particular importance was the service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing uptime for Westjet's mission-critical applications. A problem with MPLS, however, is that the more granular the service gets as the primary means to map and manage traffic, the more expensive it becomes.

ASSIGNING PRIORITIES

WestJet's situation is fairly typical of many distributed businesses. All 7,000 employees are either occasional or regular users of the WestJet network, which is centralized at redundant data centers in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The online reservation system is the most mission-critical of WestJet's networked applications, and this would need to be assigned the top priority, regardless of how bandwidth is managed.

The company also had numerous other applications, including e- mail, fleet maintenance, accounting and Internet access. In addition, WestJet wanted to implement voice-over-IP (VoIP) communications as yet another cost-saving measure.

Lee had a hunch there had to be an alternative that was both more capable and less expensive than MPLS-based traffic management. "Vendors always promise great results if you use their products or services," he observes, "and some of these claims are true. But all too often, unfortunately, many are exaggerated. So when I heard about systems that offered intelligent bandwidth management resulting in superior application performance and an extraordinarily high return on investment, I was more than a little skeptical."

Nevertheless, Lee decided to check out such claims, but rather than merely accepting the vendor's promises for results, or those of third-party testing labs or vetted lists of customer references, Lee attended a trade show.

Before attending the show, he did his homework, checking out several vendors providing intelligent bandwidth management, WAN optimization or application delivery solutions. He arrived at the show prepared with a short list of systems and a longer list of specific, probing questions. He wanted to know if these systems really worked, if they were easy to use and deploy, if they really improved application performance and overall bandwidth utilization, and if they were really a good investment. He wanted the bad news, too, being sure to ask about any problems or pitfalls.

One of the products on Lee's short list of systems was the PacketShaper from Packeteer. With such a widely used solution, Lee was able to locate enough PacketShaper users to get answers to all his questions. "These users all rated the product very highly for its comprehensive application visibility, sophisticated bandwidth- management capabilities, cost-effectiveness and ease of use," Lee recalls.

Lee remained skeptical, however, about the product's ability to meet WestJet's driving need to keep WAN bandwidth costs at a minimum. Specifically, Lee needed to accommodate the additional growth that had occurred since converting to the MPLS service, without increasing the bandwidth of any link to any site, especially at the data centers, and without incurring additional service fees for any special mapping or provisioning within the MPLS infrastructure.

Packeteer offered to let Lee conduct testing with a demonstration system. The trial involved a single PacketShaper at the primary data center that was used to gain better visibility into all the applications running on the network, and to manage bandwidth utilization more effectively with the appliance's traffic-shaping feature.

TESTING GOES WELL

"We really liked the way a single, central PacketShaper appliance was able to give us such complete visibility and control over traffic across the entire enterprise, and knew it had improved overall performance. But we did not fully appreciate the extent of the improvement in application response times and service quality until users began to complain when the trial ended," says Lee.

That was the defining moment when Lee decided to deploy the PacketShaper solution permanently in Westjet's production network.

The initial production deployment involved two PacketShaper model 6500 appliances in a. high-availability configuration with a single system installed at each of Westjet's redundant data centers. Because Westjet utilizes a centralized IT architecture, this configuration enabled Lee to implement packet shaping on all of the company's many applications.

"Within a matter of hours, the performance of our more critical applications began to improve considerably," he reports. "And although we knew we had barely begun to scratch the surface of the appliance's full potential, we quickly became 'happy campers' based on these initial results."

To be effective as an application-delivery tool, packet shaping first requires identifying all applications running on the network, and then assigning each a relative priority. With the Packet- Shaper's ability to identify some 500 different applications, the first requirement is satisfied automatically.

Assigning the relative priorities is straightforward initially, but often requires an iterative process to optimize the priorities for all applications. An optimal assignment is able to improve performance for all mission-critical and latency-sensitive applications, without noticeably affecting the performance of other applications.

WestJet's number one priority is its online reservation system. Faster response times now afford a double benefit: enhanced employee productivity and greater customer satisfaction. Westjet's other obvious high-priority application is the VoIP-based communications system, and voice quality improved dramatically merely by assigning VoIP traffic a high priority.

Lee was able to achieve these improvements by following Packeteer's intelligence service assurance approach to WAN optimization, which enables the optimization of multiple business applications without adversely impacting either the perceived or actual performance of most other applications.

Also essential to WestJet is that the traffic-shaping features are compatible with MPLS-based services. PacketShaper employs industry standards, such as DiffServ, type/class of service, virtual LANs and MPLS tags, to identify and mark individual packets to ensure that application traffic receives appropriate treatment in the public network infrastructure.

NETWORK UPGRADED

As the volume of traffic continued to grow, WestJet upgraded the configuration to redundant PacketShaper model 10000 systems at the data centers, and deployed model 3500 systems at 10 of its larger bases of operation at various airports, including some maintenance and supply facilities. The online reservation system and VoIP applications continue to get the highest priority, and the company continues to permit recreational traffic, but the distributed configuration of PacketShaper systems now enables WestJet to compress traffic over the WAN.

To obtain this additional bandwidth boost, WestJet is using PacketShaper's application-intelligent compression module. The module employs various compression technologies, including multiple compression algorithms, fragment caching techniques, header compression and packet bundling, to increase WAN throughput by up to a factor of 100. These technologies introduce little latency to preserve the quality of VoIP calls and other delay-sensitive applications. The module is installed on both model 10000 systems at the data centers, as well as on the model 3500 systems at six of the remote locations served by 1-Mbps links in WestJet's MPLS network.

"Although we have yet to formally measure the actual increase in throughput that resulted from the use of compression, we estimate the improvement to be in the range of 70 percent," Lee says. "This gain is pretty significant, and has freed up enough bandwidth to accommodate the growth in traffic over these relatively low-speed links.

"As we continue to grow, we know we will continue to need more bandwidth," explains Lee. "But with the PacketShapers, we will be able to postpone these expensive upgrades as long as possible."

By employing an effective combination of the appliance's application visibility, packet shaping and intelligent compression, the fast-growing company expects to achieve a return on its investment in less than a year by avoiding an increase in WAN bandwidth. Lee estimates that the cost of additional WAN bandwidth for a single year is more than twice the cost of a PacketShaper system, yielding a full payback in as little as six months.

In addition to postponing costly WAN bandwidth upgrades, WestJet has been able to avoid using the more expensive multiple-traffic class-labeling service provisions of the MPLS service. According to Lee, "We do bandwidth provisioning on our own with the PacketShapers, and we do it better and for less money than the carrier can."

Lee needed to accommodate the additional growth that had occurred since converting to the MPLS service, without increasing the bandwidth of any link to any site.

ABOUT PACKETEER

Dave Cote

Dave Cote has served as president, chief executive officer and director of Cupertino, Calif.-based Packeteer since October 2002. Previously, he served as vice president of worldwide marketing for Integrated Device Technology, a semiconductor company, and as vice president of marketing for ZeitNet, which was acquired by Cabletron in 1996.

Packeteer products provide distributed enterprises with fast delivery of all key business applications, including acceleration that uses unique intelligence about the application and the network to target the optimum technologies and improve network performance. Founded in 1996, Packeteer has more than 400 employees and in excess of 7,000 customers.

Packeteer recently was acquired by Blue Coat Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif., a manufacturer of WAN application delivery and secure Web gateway products. By combining PacketShaper functionality with its ProxySG appliance, Blue Coat will provide customers with the ability to see traffic on their networks and proactively accelerate, prioritize, limit or block it.

NETWORK PERFORMANCE PRODUCTS

Network performance management

Using network behavior analysis, Mazu Profiler enables IT administrators to improve management of application performance, and WAN and security/compliance initiatives. Capabilities include response-time management, WAN optimization reporting and access control list-based mitigation. The solution alerts network managers to application response time threshold violations. By providing visibility into which links and applications will benefit from optimization, Mazu Profiler allows network managers to identify and remove non-business-related traffic.-Mazu Networks

Performance monitor

Application Performance Monitor (APM) offers the visibility to monitor and pinpoint performance issues across the entire network. The system integrates the Orion Web-based interface, creating a centralized fault- and performance-management console for networks, servers and applications. APM determines the root cause of application-performance issues, performs advanced monitoring of Windows, UNIX and Linux servers, monitors end-user experience for Web applications and creates application-monitoring templates. - SolarWinds

Network monitor

WhatUp Gold Version 12 combines automated device discovery, network mapping and real-time network monitoring, as well as alerting, notification and reporting functions to deliver 360- degree visibility, actionable intelligence and control. Realtime data can be paired with historical data, and device usage data is available in real-time via workspace views and dashboards with configurable data graphs, gauges or task manager formats. -Ipswitch

Virtual bottleneck analyzer

The Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer virtual appliance identifies current and future capacity bottleneck issues in VMware ESX environments to ensure optimal performance. A single-screen management dashboard displays detailed capacity information from continuously monitored CPU, memory and storage utilization trends in VMware ESX environments across hosts, clusters and resource pools. By customizing capacity thresholds, users can receive alerts via e- mail and SNMP.-VKernel

Copyright Nelson Publishing Jul 2008

(c) 2008 Communications News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Story Source: Communications News