Quality of Service
Bandwidth Management
Organizations want to provide better service to a certain type of
traffic when bandwidth is limited by, for example, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) connection.
Instead of buying more bandwidth, organizations want to manage their existing bandwidth more
efficiently.
Business traffic such as
VoIP, ERP, critical transactions and important Web
sites should receive precedence over other types of traffic. Sometimes it is good to ensure that
important users are guaranteed to receive a certain amount of the available bandwidth, regardless
of other traffic.
With StoneGate, you can set bandwidth guarantees and/or limits to different types of traffic
so that the important business traffic will always have the required amount of bandwidth available
and the non-business traffic will not exceed the defined bandwidth limits.
Benefits
- Business traffic can receive precedence over other types of traffic
- Manage existing bandwidth more efficiently instead of buying additional bandwidth
- Limit the bandwidth usage of bulk traffic such as backup
- Give more bandwidth to important users
- Provide for certain services that require QoS in order to work reliably (e.g.,
VoIP)
- Co-operate with other QoS devices to achieve end-to-end QoS
Quality of Service
Some network traffic, like voice streams and real time data for
applications like Citrix, is very sensitive to delay (latency).
Organizations need to be able to prioritize such traffic inside their network and to label
this traffic so that external network nodes can handle it correctly as well.
With StoneGate you can use the QoS classes for prioritizing the traffic. To provide
end-to-end QoS, it is not enough that bandwidth management and prioritizing is done in the
StoneGate firewall. The classification information should also be relayed to the other devices
between the end points, so that they can handle it properly.
That is why StoneGate also provides you with the possibility of marking the outgoing packets
with the DSCP (Differentiated Services Codepoint) field.