Oct
31
2008

Analyze Traffic with Cisco Bandwidth Quality Manager

An article by Fabio Semperboni

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In the era of electronic exchanges, tiny spikes and bottlenecks in network traffic can create delays which compromise the split-second accuracy needed for effective trading. Tracking down these problems has been beyond the reach of any technology-until now, thanks to Cisco Systems, Inc.

While traditional network monitoring systems can only analyze traffic behavior over a minimum of five minutes or so on average, the Cisco Bandwidth Quality Manager (BQM), part of the Cisco Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) Solution, can get down to millisecond level.

This means IT managers in stock exchanges and trading houses can now see what is happening to traffic on their network almost on a per-packet basis. Cisco BQM’s diagnostics are not limited to watching network behavior, either; it can also provide information on why the delays happen.

Cisco Bandwidth Quality Manager (BQM) is a next-generation network application performance management product that provides monitoring visibility, and intelligent bandwidth provisioning which controls latency and loss performance. The control of network latency and loss is a vital ingredient in delivering maximum performance for networked applications.

Some of the issues faced by customers include:

Poor performance in the data center if the network exhibits uncontrolled or intermittently high levels of latency
Collaborative applications like Cisco TelePresence require consistent delivery of controlled latency and low jitter in the network.
Algorithmic trading and distributed grid computing require ultra-low levels of network latency and loss (typically less than 5 milliseconds and no packet loss).

Cisco BQM has a broad set of patented and patent-pending features that include: