Our Network Engineers explain how Flint TS can help improve application delivery, enhance performance, ensure high availability and strengthen security for networks and e-commerce platforms.
When network traffic is poorly managed, symptoms often include problems with load balancing, SSL offloading and traffic prioritisation – all of which make customers unhappy, leading to churn and loss of revenue.
Our decades of experience has shown us that the only way to do resolve these problems is to take a systematic approach to managing network traffic effectively.
The most common problems we see caused by poor traffic management are:
- Traffic Spikes: Frequent traffic surges during promotional events leading to server overloads and downtimes.
- SSL Offloading: Systems can’t handle SSL traffic efficiently, leading to increased latency.
- Security Problems: The threat of malicious traffic and attacks increases significantly, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
- Lack of Scalability: It becomes increasingly difficult to scale applications to meet growing demand.
- Complex Configuration: Managing and configuring traffic policies is excessively complex and time-consuming.
Five Steps to Solve Network Traffic Management Challenges
To solve these problems for our customers in the telecoms and networking sectors, we often use Local Traffic Management (LTM) hardware and software as a key part of the solution.
Here are the five steps we take to get network traffic flowing freely:
Step 1: Plan and Design
We conduct a thorough assessment of the existing infrastructure and traffic patterns before identifying critical requirements, including availability, security and scalability.
We then design the solution architecture integrating local traffic management with existing applications and servers.
Step 2: Deployment
We install relevant LTM hardware in primary and secondary data centres to ensure redundancy.
The network is then configured to ensure:
- Load Balancing to distribute traffic efficiently across servers.
- SSL Offloading to handle encryption/decryption to reduce the load on servers.
- iRules Development for custom traffic management policies.
Health Monitoring – to check the status of backend servers and reroute traffic if a server goes down.
Step 3: Testing
The testing phase is key to ensure that traffic is managed effectively. In a safe test environment, we simulate traffic spikes to ensure the system will be able to handle peak loads and test failover mechanisms to ensure very high network availability.
Step 4: Go-Live
Once testing is successfully completed, we gradually migrate traffic onto the new LTM system, continuously monitoring to ensure optimal performance.
Step 5: Post-Implementation Support
Once the new LTM is live, we provide training for IT staff on managing and troubleshooting the system so they can continuously optimise configurations based on real-world traffic patterns and performance metrics.
Overcoming Traffic Management Challenges
Implementing a Local Traffic Management system offers significant improvements including:
Performance Improvement
Load times typically go down by 30% due to efficient traffic management and SSL offloading, and the system will be able to handle up to 50% more concurrent users during peak times without degradation in performance.
High Availability
We typically see 99.99% uptime with automatic failover and health monitoring capabilities and seamless handling of server failures without impacting user experience.
Security Enhancement
Built-in security helps to mitigate DDoS attacks and data is better protected with robust SSL/TLS encryption management.
Operational Efficiency
The result is a simplified traffic management system, with lower administrative demands through automated load balancing and monitoring.