Quality of Service
Bandwidth Management
Organizations want to provide better service to a certain
type of traffic when bandwidth is limited e.g. by an ISP connection. They do not want to buy more
bandwidth, but they want to manage existing bandwidth more efficiently.
Business traffic such as VPN traffic, VoIP, e-mail and important WWW-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.
StoneGate provides you a possibility of setting either bandwidth guarantees and/or limits for different types of traffic so that they will always have the required amount of bandwidth available,and also so they do not exceed the defined bandwidth limits.
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 a way to prioritize such traffic inside their network and a way 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.
Benefits
- Manage existing bandwidth more efficiently instead of buying additional bandwidth
- Business traffic can receive precedence over other types of traffic
- 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