Controlling Your Bandwidth

The most expensive part of any application infrastructure is usually the total amount of bandwidth that your business uses. Popular low- or zero-revenue services can 'steal' all the available bandwidth from revenue-generating services, reducing the quality of service to your paying users, resulting in customer churn. ZXTM can help prevent this from happening.

Bandwidth Management Software: Quick Links

How does ZXTM let me manage my bandwidth?
Doesn't reserving bandwidth for a service mean that no other service can use it?
When a service reaches its bandwidth limit, what does ZXTM do?
On which operating systems can I use ZXTM's bandwidth management features?
I run many services; do I have to configure a separate bandwidth rule for each one?
How can I monitor how much bandwidth my services are using?

How does ZXTM let me manage my bandwidth?

For each hosted service, ZXTM lets you specify a maximum bandwidth limit. This means you can ensure that mission-critical services always have sufficient bandwidth to run a a suitable quality of service, and that less important yet popular services are prevented from using up all the available bandwidth. The net result is that customers needing to use mission-critical or premium services will always experience a responsive application.

Doesn't reserving bandwidth for a service mean that no other service can use it?

When some bandwidth management software products reserve a minimum bandwidth for a priority service, this bandwidth becomes ringfenced, meaning that no other service can use it, even if the priority service is dormant. Given the cost of bandwidth, this is wasted resource which could be used by a different service that actually needs it. ZXTM is designed for the real world; if the reserved bandwidth is not actually being used by the priority service, then it is made available to other services until the priority service begins to need it again. This ensures that you are always making best use of your available bandwidth.

When a service reaches its bandwidth limit, what does ZXTM do?

ZXTM is continually recalculating the amount of bandwidth being used by each of the services it manages. When a service is going to exceed its limit, ZXTM gently throttles the rate down to ensure that it remains at the configured threshold.

On which operating systems can I use ZXTM's bandwidth management software features?

ZXTM's bandwidth management software features are available as an option on ZXTM appliances (not ZXTM Load Balancer).

For software versions of ZXTM, this option is tightly integrated with the advanced Linux 2.6 kernel and its Class-Based Queuing (CBQ) features. It's available on suutable Linux server systems, and is also available on Microsoft Windows 2003 R2 and in the Virtual Appliance.

I run many services; do I have to configure a separate bandwidth rule for each one?

No. Just as with TrafficScript™ rules, when you define a bandwidth management rule, it is put into a shared store called the Catalog. This means that you can apply the same bandwidth rule to as many services as you require.

How can I monitor how much bandwidth my services are using?

It's easy; just like every other aspect of ZXTM, you can monitor bandwidth usage for each service both through the web-based graphical user interface, or via an SNMP-capable network monitor such as HP OpenView.