We often assume that applications are at fault for their ponderous performance on a network. But, as SAS Group has proved, you can achieve wonders with a little judicious fine tuning. The company is now a dab hand at getting the best quality of service from a network.
Its project for recruitment company The Venn Group was something of a proving ground.
With 350 chatty recruitment agents on the phone from early morning until long into the night, busily whizzing CVs and presentations up and down the country, the rationalisation of Venn's network could create a significant boost to productivity.
Venn Group grew rapidly for a company that was only formed in 2001. It’s now one of the recognised brands in the recruitment industry, and its number is on speed dial for job seekers in the accountancy, C&I, financial services, technology, legal, human resources and public sector markets. Like many companies that expand quickly, it can become a victim of its own success. When the headcount is shooting up, and the priority is to get new users up and running with phones, faxes and PCs, it’s difficult to find time to time to document the network infrastructure. Let alone fine tune it.
Venn Group’s five man IT department would have had their hands full supporting all those users and keeping the network running.
In 2009 it appointed a new head of ITY, Rob Simpson, who decided to bite the bullet and fine tune the company’s BT network infrastructure. He appointed telecoms service provider, SAS Group, to help him get a clearer picture of the network, and to sort out the bottlenecks.
 “We knew the way the network was structured could be improved but we also had visibility issues across the infrastructure as a whole,” said Rob Simpson. “If applications weren’t performing correctly, we didn’t know if the network or the applications were at fault.”
SAS audited the application infrastructure. It found that in key applications the class of service (CoS) was not correctly applied across the entire network. Default Microsoft apps were not performing. Not, as many would assume, because of any failure on Microsoft’s part, but because they were being choked by other traffic.
So SAS worked  with BT to have the class of service correctly applied on the WAN infrastructure. This boosted LAN performance by changing routing protocols. Installation of additional Cisco hardware helped ramp up the switching performance too.
“With the network properly configured, the applications run faster now, support calls are down, and presumably the project has already paid for itself,” says IT-footprint’s carbon consultant Gerry Absalom.  “This exemplifies the ethos of IT-footprint. Efficiency measures lower your carbon footprint. And, more importantly, they save you money.”

SAS Group