First American was careful to select a QoS (Quality of Service) mechanism that didn't overly compromise its other strategic WAN applications, including e-mail, ERP (enterprise resource planning), some intranet applications and eventually VoIP (voice over IP), which the company says it plans to add in the near future. The company went with Cisco Systems' Custom Queuing QoS feature for putting Fast-TS (Fast Transaction System), a homegrown application that generates titles and escrow policies for the real-estate market, in the fast lane, says Ahmad Sidani, network manager for First American.
"It was our latest companywide application over the IP WAN, and we wanted to make sure we deployed it properly," says Sidani of First American, a $2.8 billion real-estate services company based in Santa Ana, Calif. "We didn't want any other traffic to suffer."
The company's main tool for all this is Cisco's QoS Policy Manager (QPM), which sets and manages QoS parameters such as the amount of bandwidth and latency an application needs. First American configured the Custom Queuing feature so Fast-TS gets priority treatment if the IP/frame relay WAN pipe is at 80 percent utilization. Theoretically, if one or more other applications need only the remaining 20 percent, Fast-TS and those others can run simultaneously. But if those applications need more, FAST-TS traffic gets precedence.
The object was to give FAST-TS the right-of-way without bumping other traffic unnecessarily. Cisco's Custom Queuing let First American "color" the traffic based on the application, rather than on bandwidth allocation, which is how Cisco's Priority Queuing feature operates, Sidani says.
Priority Queuing is aimed at short-term, high-priority traffic and would have always pushed Fast-TS traffic ahead of other nonvoice applications such as e-mail. That could have left e-mail or other applications stranded if the WAN were especially busy.
First American uses QPM to classify an application's traffic based on the source IP address of the centralized Fast-TS servers. It's an essential tool for ensuring QoS management and distribution in First American's strategy to centralize its network operations for e-business, Sidani says. Without QPM, First American would have had to manually configure and control QoS parameters in each router and switch on the network. "It's a breeze [with QPM] compared to doing QoS manually, and it means fewer errors and a more manageable way to deploy QoS," Sidani says.
As early adopters of QPM, Sidani and his team learned a lot about QoS on the job. One lesson -- that not all LAN devices support QoS features -- caused some early implementation snags for First American. "You need to identify the exact software and firmware versions running on each device, and make sure the clients are connected to a LAN switch with QoS capabilities," Sidani says. "So the more details you have on your environment, the better."
First American meanwhile is upgrading to the latest QPM release, 2.0, which in combination with CiscoWorks2000 Service Management Solution (SMS) can monitor service levels based on policies. And the Fast-TS application eventually will be used for other transaction-oriented tasks at First American.
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