The financial-services company recently began testing QoS in preparation for adding videoconferencing--and eventually voice--to its backbone. ABFS wants to ensure that the new traffic won't bump traffic from its priority applications. "We want the revenue-generating traffic to be ahead of other traffic," says Mark Avrin, manager of network services for ABFS, Bala Cynwyd, Pa. Avrin says getting the QoS infrastructure fully implemented in its switches and routers will take about a year.
ABFS' network services group is developing SLAs for the company's business units, which include consumer loan group Upland Mortgage, American Business Credit, New Jersey Mortgage and Investment Corp., and Processing Service Center, a loan-processing unit. "That's key to how we are going to do business as an IT group of the future," Avrin says. "Our business units don't care if they are No. 9 or No. 1 priority in a queue of 10--they just want to know how long it will take a screen to refresh."
ABFS runs a 10/100-Mbps switched environment to the desktop, with a gigabit core running on Alcatel switches and Cisco Systems routers at the edge. The switches can prioritize traffic based on the source and destination addresses, protocol (such as HTTP) or port number. "We can prioritize our loan traffic going to the Oracle database ahead of other traffic," Avrin says. ABFS also plans to use QoS traffic distinctions to ensure that priority traffic like video or voice isn't disrupted by backups during business hours.
One of the first apps ABFS will configure with QoS is PC imaging, which can clog the pipe, too. The company's desktop support group will image, or mirror, a PC system's software over the network, something that can eat up 1 GB to 2 GB of traffic. "We'd like to see that traffic recognized by QoS and pushed down the priority stack," Avrin says.
For now, though, ABFS has overengineered its network as it gears up for more demanding apps like video. But once video or voice joins the network, even a gigabit pipe can experience jitter or other interference. "You don't want to go thinking that since your network isn't filled to capacity you don't need QoS," Avrin says.
Configuring QoS parameters today involves manual effort, and it takes a lot of trial and error. It won't do to simply give the sales force priority-one service, because even that department's noncritical Internet research would also get the top slot, for example. "We need the flexibility to shape by source and type of traffic," Avrin says.
Today there's no point-and-click management of QoS. It takes a network engineer to set up QoS parameters, and you can't just drag and drop the marketing department to the load server as priority one. "It's not an exact science," Avrin says. "It will take a lot of tuning."
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