Will your network last the distance at the Melbourne Cup?

When the Melbourne Cup stops the nation next Tuesday, not only will there be a flood of frocks, fascinators and fillies, there will be a torrent of online video beaming the delights and disasters of the day, and of course, the big race to offices and pubs across Australia.

“This gives local businesses a vital opportunity to test their networks and prepare for the building tsunami of video,” explained Rajeev Mitroo, Managing Director Blue Coat Australia and New Zealand. “Work day network spiking will be heavily tested by ‘the race that stops the nation’ on Tuesday 1^st November.”

The spikes in traffic caused by major events present a number of issues for business: the inexorable rise in traffic, the blurring between work and personal usage, and most importantly that IT management need to plan for the next “big thing” to ensure that business can continue during popular events.

There is an explosion of video usage across Australia – in May alone it was estimated that YouTube had over 10 million unique Australian visitors. Mitroo urged chief executives to ensure that the hungry video beast isn’t chewing through bandwidth to the detriment of critical business applications.

Business critical apps, branch offices and employee productivity

Video streaming, news and replays can very quickly congest an IT manager’s internet gateway. In branches with more slender WAN links, yet needing to connect to the central offices for applications and data, critical internal business traffic can be impaired.

What can organisations do to manage video demand?

There are several options open to IT managers to ensure that their internet gateway is fully available for business use, rather than overwhelmed by online sports, news or events coverage such as a royal wedding.

Certain organisations may take a strict approach by attempting to block web access to all known sites that stream video live or block any video applications, including news videos, YouTube or sports replays.

A second option would be to block the protocols used for streaming. However, this may include all Real, Microsoft and Flash streams, so by doing this, internal streams, streaming news and standard parts of web sites would be blocked, interfering with work-related web information.

Instead of either of the above approaches, organisations may look to adopt a more flexible attitude that keeps employee morale high and minimises any disruption.

IT management can improve their network infrastructure to reduce stream usage, optimise streaming data and actively time-shift the events to be during normal breaks in the working day:

1. Bandwidth management devices at the internet egress point can be set to define one stream provider as “approved” and given a high priority and other streams are lower priority or blocked.

2. Appliances can be installed within the organisation’s network to split the streams – meaning that one stream request can be sent to multiple users simultaneously. This greatly reduces the upstream bandwidth required.

3. WAN optimisation appliances that support video can be deployed between offices to cache and optimise the protocols between them.

4. Many of the stream splitting appliances can also cache the video content, allowing users to watch the game later at a less disruptive time,

In this way, management can allow video content whilst minimizing the load on the internet gateway or branch office by caching locally through a proxy appliance.

Employees can indulge their inner fashionista or sports fan and events such as the Melbourne Cup and the Olympic Games shouldn’t impact access of business-related video or content on websites. With the right solutions in place, we can all watch the Melbourne Cup and its sartorial sins this coming Tuesday afternoon without impacting crucial business operations.