SaaS unified communication has become a must have tool for any enterprise to be collaborative. Have you ever thought of enhancing your online meeting performance? Did you feel like there is nothing you can do with a SaaS app performance? If you have yes to one of or two of the questions, you may find this post informative.
Let’s get started by revisiting a typical network topology we have for today. This is probably a network topology you are very familiar with. Your online meeting traffic to SaaS is all through public internet connection. You have very little control over the network quality. Very likely you will need to call up your ISP whenever you have network performance questions.
To make the discussion more intuitive, I am going to use Microsoft Teams as an example. The same principle should apply to other unified communication tool equally.
We knew approximity does matter when it comes to network performance. The closer is always the better. Microsoft does provide a online checking tool for us to check the location of the data center we are connecting to.
You can perform your test from your location to get to know where are you connecting to.
Hopefully, we are not getting too far away from the connecting Microsoft data center.
Now, we know where we are. Let’s take a closer look on unified communication traffic. In addition to the data center location, network performance is no doubt an important factor to the communication quality.
Microsoft provides a command line tool to allow us to check the network quality.
Some traffic like file downloading is more sensitive to bandwidth. For unified communication, there are three other metrics affecting performance and their requirements are:
Jitter < 30ms
Latency < 100ms
RTT < 200ms
Packet Lost < 1%
Please note that RTT is the round trip time and it is Latency X 2. If you don’t have the Microsoft tool handy, you can use general “ping” tool to check the RTT instead.
Without a tool, you can actually tell if any or more of the mentioned metrics is not up to standard by user experience.
If Jitter is high, you will get robotics sound. High Latency ends up with walkie-talkie effect. Finally, high Packet Lost causes words dropped in the call and the call will be cutting.
How do we get rid of the network issue to the SaaS? VMware SASE SD-WAN can help.
VMware SASE SD-WAN is a cloud native solution to help you to boost the network performance to the SaaS. If also helps to boost network performance to your other IaaS, PaaS and private cloud traffic.
By deploying VMware SD-WAN edge router to your offices, you will get immediate performance improvement without doing any policy setting. It is a plug-n-play solution.
VMware SD-WAN by default keeps eye on unified communication traffic and performing tuning continuously.
Here are the reported performance enhancement after VMware SD-WAN was deployed.
So how does it work? The VMware SD-WAN DMPO gets the optimization done for us. For instance, when Jitter is detected, dynamic per packet steering will kick in to route single packet through a faster route. Imagine it is like a Google map on your phone, when you ask for a route from point A to B, the map will show you multiple routes. Some routes in green are fast. Routes in red are congested. You as a driver will choose the fastest route to get to your point B.
Jitter effect is remediated if delay between packet is eased. With this packet based remediation, existing session can be maintained. Cure is done on packet level without session re-establishment which is an expensive operation because it is disruptive.
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