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Performance control

Streamcore's advanced control features allow you to control performance and guarantee Quality of Experience. 

User Competition Prioritization (UCP)

Automatically prioritize traffic between users based on session behaviors

Advanced QoS

Dynamically prioritize business applications and VoIP/video competing with other types of traffic

End-to-End Traffic Management

Boost WAN capacity with compression
Secure site-to-site communications with encryption
Optimize the bandwidth usage of dual access links with WAN load balancing

 

User Competition Prioritization (UCP)

Streamcore products use a unique, patented technology based on Per Flow Queuing mechanisms that automatically prioritize application traffic by taking into account instantaneous bandwidth requirements. The UCP engine (User Competition Prioritization) guarantees users maximum application performance and ease of use by analyzing application behavior. Appropriate prioritization is applied automatically without requiring specific configuration or traffic classification, no matter the variation in the number of users (sessions) or in application behavior (e.g. version changes).

Interactive Traffic Automated Management
Thanks to Streamcore's Fast Start mechanism, interactive data streams are prioritized automatically. Within a Citrix, Windows Terminal Services or encrypted (SSL) session, interactive keystrokes are identified automatically and instantly assigned the highest priority. Even with large data transfers in progress, keystroke fluidity is guaranteed.
 
 
Transactional and Large Data Transfer Traffic Automated Management
Contrary to a static QoS engine (e.g., Class of Service on a router), the UCP Engine's Fair Share mechanisms control competition among users, which is important as the number of strategic transactional applications grows. Access to a given application is distributed equitably among all users.
For large data transfers, the first user will not monopolize all the bandwidth. Individual throughput is adapted instantly for all simultaneous users.
 

Advanced QoS

Streamcore’s advanced QoS engine gives priority to mission-critical data applications and VoIP on the network:
  • Bandwidth is optimized according to business needs
  • Secondary or disruptive traffic (e.g., recreational Internet traffic, antivirus or operating system updates, etc.) does not affect performance
Once a critical application has been identified and classified, priority is granted using business-oriented logic. Administrators simply define the business criticality of each application. They do not need to delve into the complexity of the application profile. (e.g., minimum throughput, burst, queuing, etc.)
 
A dedicated control mechanism can be used to guarantee performance of multimedia traffic such as VoIP or video. Multimedia traffic is handled by a reserved bandwidth mechanism (per session or for a group of sessions) that will guarantee a minimum latency and jitter over the WAN.
 
Once criticality levels are defined, the advanced QoS engine automatically ensures that the performance ratios are applied for each session. It arbitrates bandwidth allocation whenever demand exceeds capacity on a given link, based on the criticality levels of each active session. Regardless of the type of application or the number of users present at any time, performance levels are always pre-determined.
 

End-to-End Traffic Management

When a StreamGroomer has been deployed at a branch office, the following advanced end-to-end traffic management features are available:
- Compression
- Encryption
- WAN load balancing
 
Compression
Streamcore’s compression features make more network bandwidth available while the QoS engines ensure that business applications have the throughput they require to run properly. Streamcore's solutions use this winning combination to guarantee response times and to deliver continuously improved performance to users.
 
Despite the use of prioritization mechanisms, links may still be under-sized to meet the needs of business applications. That is when compression can help to increase capacity without modifying the existing infrastructure. The average throughput gain ranges between 1.5 and 4 and can be as high as 10 for certain types of traffic.
 
Compression is implemented on an end-to-end basis between two StreamGroomers, The appliances generate a shared dictionary and can then exchange labels that symbolizerepetitive sequences carried over the WAN. Then, traffic can be decompressed and delivered over the LAN. This method is transparent for servers and client computers and works for all IP flows.  

Encryption
Streamcore’s encryption option can be activated to secure communication between two sites equipped with StreamGroomers. Once secured and authenticated, communications can be established between the SGM and StreamGroomers. An innovative centralized key management system allows encryption to be turned on and off via a single parameter.

 
WAN Load Balancing
When two paths are available between sites equipped with StreamGroomers, WAN load balancing can be activated to optimize dual access link bandwidth. For instance, WAN load balancing can be provisioned when a backup link is used only as a fail-over to take advantage of the available bandwidth.
 
Several load balancing modes are available including per session load balancing or per application load balancing. Availability of each access link is monitored by an active probe to automatically adapt the bandwidth management mechanism and optionally use a backup QoS policy in the event that only a single access link is available.