Technology Overview

Application Prioritization

ZeroOutages parent company, XRoads Networks, is the inventor of Dynamic Bandwidth Management. DBM is the ability to automatically and dynamically throttle end-user application traffic in order to ensure fair distribution of bandwidth and guarantee bandwidth for mission critical applications like VoIP, Citrix, RDP, and other real-time applications.

Guarantee Bandwidth for Critical Applications

DBM allows network administrators to set pre-defined bandwidth levels to guarantee network resources for critical applications. This means that applications like VoIP will always have the bandwidth they need to complete calls without interruption or dropped packets. Additional prioritization can be assigned to these critical applications to ensure that they receive the fastest queuing even when the network is fully utilized.

Automatically Throttle Abusive Traffic

DBM will automatically throttle end-user traffic which exceeds pre-defined levels and ensure that mission critical applications always get the bandwidth they need. While other "traffic shaping" solutions must identify every possible application in order to shape it, DBM instead identifies traffic based on session flows. This means that unlike other "traffic shaping" solutions, the ZO platform can automatically throttle ANY application as soon as it comes out.

As demonstrated in this diagram, DBM works with our XRE (XFlow Reporting Engine) to collect packet data arriving on each of its interfaces and then determine whether each session flow traversing the ZO platform meets the pre-defined criteria, if it does not (like P2P in this example), it is throttled.

Optimized Application Delivery

The DBM module is able to effectively optimize the delivery of critical applications by ensuring that those applications receive the amount of bandwidth they need in order to provide end-users with real-time and responsive connectivity. Some of the applications DBM optimizes include:

How Does It Work?

As peer-to-peer and other applications become more sophisticated the ability to perform application matching has become more and more difficult. To improve the ZO platforms ability to control these applications ZeroOutages developed its DBM technology.

Session Monitoring & Prioritization

Automatically Prioritize Applications

  • Secure Web Access
  • E-Mail Access
  • Peer-to-Perr / IM
  • Remote Desktop Access
  • CRM Access

Instead of attempting to constantly modifying our application database to match every change to each peer-to-peer and recreational application on the market, this new approach allows the ZO to dynamically manage any application based on session utilization information.

DBM continuously monitors the usage of all sessions traversing the appliance and as overall utilization reaches over 80% it will begin prioritizing traffic based on utilization and administratively defined rules.

Unlike other traffic shaping equipment, the ZO appliance is able to analyze any application, regardless of whether it is in our database and prioritize that traffic based on pre-defined administrative preferences. The network administrator can determine which applications/end-users should receive higher priority and all other traffic will be prioritized based on session statistics and overall utilization, thus reducing high traffic users, smoothly overall bandwidth usage, and ensuring equal bandwidth distribution for mission critical applications.