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ITIL: Service Delivery

Cost Management

Most of the Service Delivery disciplines have cost as a consideration, but the Cost Management discipline focuses solely on costs: ways of controlling the costs of IT services and delivering services in a cost efficient manner.

PacketShaper's application discovery and advanced classification functionality provides detailed data on exactly which applications are using expensive WAN resources. By viewing PacketShaper's Top Ten lists and graphs, you can see exactly which applications are using valuable WAN resources. If recreational traffic is consistently showing up in your Top Ten list, employees are wasting bandwidth. Wasted bandwidth equals wasted money. Using PacketShaper's Shaping Module, though, you can make sure that your business applications get the bandwidth they need. With bandwidth controls in place, you may be able to downsize your link or at least avoid a link upgrade — either way, PacketShaper saves you money.

Peak Capacity Analysis

Since networks are a utility, planning for peak demand is a critical piece of their management. PacketShaper provides the tools to both analyze utilization and exert control over how bandwidth gets utilized. The Utilization graphs for your inbound and outbound links help you analyze your link's bandwidth average and peak rates. If you see that peak rates are frequently spiking near or at the link's capacity, a bandwidth upgrade may be in order, but other options are available. See Capacity Optimization below.

There are also ways to manage peak traffic loads so that you can reduce or shed low priority traffic during critical peak demand times. By combining PacketShaper's schedule and control features, you have the ability to manage bandwidth differently at different times or on different days. For example, you can schedule restrictive policies to constrain peer-to-peer traffic during business hours, but configure more lenient policies during evenings and weekends when bandwidth is not at a premium. See Vary Management Strategy by Time and Day.

Capacity Optimization

The Shaping Module's partitions and policies allow you to control how bandwidth gets utilized and can smooth bandwidth demand, such that a link upgrade isn't necessary. Likewise, the Compression Module allows you to get more bandwidth out of your existing link. Traffic size reductions of 3x or more can provide sizable cost benefits.

Network Efficiency

Retransmissions — traffic that must traverse the network multiple times for successful arrival — should optimally be as close to zero as possible. But when router queues deepen and cause dropped packets, retransmissions spike. When latency increases the frequency of time-outs, retransmissions spike. When a busy IP network behaves precisely as designed under heavy loads, retransmissions spike. Buying bandwidth to support a high rate of retransmissions is a costly, wasteful situation.

Determining why packets are being dropped and taking steps to reduce the number of packet drops, will allow existing bandwidth to be used more efficiently. The Shaping Module's control features, including TCP Rate Control, help avoid router queues, dropped packets, and retransmissions so that your network is more efficient. But if you suspect retransmissions are a problem on your network, PacketShaper provides you with the tools to investigate. See Assess Wasted Network Capacity for details.

View the other disciplines in the ITIL Service Delivery area:

Service Level Management  

Capacity Management

Continuity Management

Availability Management

Security Management