Cancer Research gets networking boost

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UK charity Cancer Research has fixed its bandwidth problems by installing a packet shaping appliance to improve the application performance across its network.

The organisation put a second PacketShaper 6500 appliance from WAN application optimisation company Packeteer, to fix problems following the installation of an MPLS network by BT across the charity's 34 sites in the UK.

The links were a mix of fixed bandwidth, ADSL and flex circuits which were various bandwidths sitting on 100Mbps circuits. The flex circuit was unable to flex up to the megabytes required because BT were not rate limiting the traffic, and instead simply dropped off packets to ensure other traffic could pass through as soon as the MB limit was reached.

Despite consultation and testing with BT and attempts to configure Cancer Research UK's core switches to limit the traffic, the charity came to the conclusion that the most practical and economical solution would be to purchase a device which would control the traffic from its headquarters.

Taking a 10Mbps PacketShaper 6500 already in use at Cancer Research UK, a testing period showed that it was possible to increase traffic from 2Mbps to 10Mbps on the 15Mbps flex circuit coming into headquarters. Packeteer provided a 48Mbps 6500 appliance so Cancer Research UK could have a more accurate impression of whether the products could really provide the solution it sought. At the end of this period, IT staff came to the conclusion that rather than outlay to replace the core network switches to provide the rate limiting, the most cost effective solution would be to install the PacketShaper appliance.

"One problem we were up against was that a lot of large scientific images travel around the network causing bottlenecks," said Cancer Research UK project manager Jane Swindle. "One of the advantages of using Packeteer is that it allows us to identify such traffic and trickle it out slowly, optimising other traffic to move across the network without delays."

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