More thoughts on content prepositioning
Tuesday, 02 March 2010 11:25.
Are you getting beaten up by your Sales Director because your Moscow sales office can’t train on the new Sales 2.0 webinar? Is your CEO giving you ‘evils’ because Shanghai can’t view the company results video he spent hours recording? Content Prepositioning is the answer to these and many other ‘high-access, media-rich content being delivered over high-cost low-speed bandwidth’ issues that are being experienced in today’s fast-paced environment.
With companies having offices distributed around the globe, uniform access to corporate resources is becoming ever more vital. However, bandwidth is expensive – areas such as the Middle East, Russia, and South East Asia can have exceptionally high costs just for low bandwidth links due to the available local services. When offices are on opposite sides of the planet, even if you are able to throw as much bandwidth as you like at the problem there is still the issue of network slowdown. This is due to the high latency experienced across the links especially via TCP-based applications which have restrictive window sizes as standard and are often rather ‘chatty’ requiring many round trips to acknowledge data before the next chunk is sent.
So even with the biggest of IT budgets for network capacity, users can still experience poor performance. Often the reality is users have relatively slow links especially if there are many dispersed offices as it is simply not economical to supply every office with a 10Mbps link!
This is where content prepositioning can help, by locating rich media content locally before it is required, users will experience LAN-like access with negligible latency ensuring your employees can view your fancy hi-definition company results video without getting frustrated by stuttering video and intermittent audio. The video is simply downloaded out of office hours when the network activity is low so that come the morning it will be waiting ready to play for your employees. If multiple users need to access the same content then only a single transaction across the WAN is required rather than many users trying to download the same file, congesting the link and impacting more business critical traffic. This is just one of the areas that content prepositioning can is effective, indeed any situation which requires users to access large files such as documents, drawings, presentations or rich media via a low speed link will benefit enormously.
Intergence can provide content prepositioning solutions which are cost effective and maximise user productivity by ensuring content is available when required without loading the WAN during business hours. Have a look at my white paper for more information about how we can help provide solutions which both meet the business needs and budget whilst maximising return on investment.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
