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Maxtor Puts Business Apps First on Its Network
May 17, 1999

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By Kelly Jackson Higgins Everyone's talking about QoS (Quality of Service) for IP, but not many companies are actually doing it. Most are just bulking up on bandwidth. But Maxtor Corp. is configuring its routers to give the company's new SAP business applications priority over other traffic on its global network. "We were trying to be as cost-effective as possible by not putting in capacity we wouldn't be using," says Scott Hicar, IT director for Maxtor, Milpitas, Calif.

Maxtor, a disk drive manufacturer that outsources most of its U.S. IT operations to EDS, leverages the priority-queuing feature in its Cisco Systems routers. Priority queuing gives SAP applications (finance and manufacturing, for example) the frame relay network's express lane during rush hour. "We had fixed bandwidth on the frame relay WAN and point-to-point T1s that had to be prioritized to guarantee throughput to the SAP servers," says Pete Schuyler, infrastructure specialist for EDS and network director for the Maxtor account.

Because SAP traffic is sometimes bursty and sometimes not, other prioritization features were inappropriate for it. EDS and Maxtor didn't select Cisco's waited-fair queuing, which gives precedence to short data transfers, for that reason. Cisco's custom queuing didn't make sense either, since it required divvying up bandwidth based on more static traffic patterns. With priority queuing, SAP applications are assigned to dedicated lanes that they share when traffic is lighter. "Priority queuing is an advantage when the network is congested," Schuyler says. "And there's no slow time on this network" given Maxtor's global operations, he says.

Disk-drive orders are typically entered from SAP client machines at Maxtor's Longmont, Colo., site to its SAP servers in Sacramento, Calif., over the company's frame relay WAN. "Orders are pulled from our Singapore site, which does the packing and shipping and sends an acknowledgement back to the SAP servers in Sacramento," says Hicar. Priority queuing makes the throughput of SAP applications consistent. The downside of priority queuing is that the SAP traffic flows can make throughput for Maxtor's other applications--including intranet, Internet and Banyan Vines printing--unpredictable.

The tricky part is how Maxtor will be able to maintain SAP's priority status when it adds more applications to the network, such as more Web servers. "If we stick more Web servers in Sacramento, it could take away bandwidth from SAP," Schuyler says. For that reason, Maxtor later may adopt standards-based IP QoS, such as Diff-serv, where the IP header is used to prioritize different types of traffic.

"Turning on this feature now would add overhead to the existing routers," Schuyler says. Standards-based IP QoS might make more sense when the company adds multimedia traffic such as voice and video to its IP-based network, which would compete with the SAP applications for bandwidth.

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