Allot Boosts User Experience and Productivity for Mellanox
About Mellanox Technologies
Mellanox Technologies (NASDAQ: MLNX) is a leading supplier of high-performance end-to-end solutions that increase data center efficiency by delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance. Mellanox provides network and multicore processors, network adapters, switches, cables, software and silicon, that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage, network security, telecom and financial services. The company employs 2900 people worldwide.
Challenge
Mellanox uses Skype for Business and other collaborative applications to meet its needs for flexible communication across multiple time zones, on a multitude of devices. Senior management experienced videoconferencing problems, such as freezing video, stalling audio and disconnections that impaired productivity. C-level executives urgently wanted to solve these problems and understand, classify and measure every IP-based application, with the following goals:
- Assure the performance of Mellanox’s critical IP- based enterprise communications system
- Improve users’ quality of experience (QoE)
- Prevent anomalous and disruptive behavior with improved network stability
- Allocate network resources to optimize functionality and efficiency
Aside from being cost-effective, the solution needed to be integrated with the pre-existing environment quickly, without disrupting other important network functions. Mellanox also wanted to retain their current network IP structure.
Solution
Allot consulted with its top Professional Services engineers and our partner, Oasis, to see how we could address this very specific challenge. Oasis is also a preferred system integrator for Mellanox, a perfect fit. So Allot was able to reassure the customer of our capabilities as we prepared a proof of concept (POC).
First, we identified and classified the specific issues and VoIP application that we needed to address and ensured that we could deliver a viable solution. We installed and implemented our solution which manages bandwidth, provides real-time analytics and traffic steering to help control bandwidth utilization and costs while ensuring Quality of Experience (QoE) for all network users.
Our solution has a policy enforcement capability that enabled Mellanox to prioritize voice and video traffic and help enhance the planning and design of network infrastructure. This was done so that potential pain points, such as periodic congestion could be more efficiently identified and comprehensively avoided in future.
All of this was achieved without degrading performance in any other part of the network. Allot’s solution was deployed at the network’s core rather than on routers or firewalls, unlike other solutions, which can degrade the performance of these elements. As a pure network-based solution it was deployed in a single location and covers all users with no need to modify.
Vladik Arshansky, IT Infrastructure Manager at Mellanox, said: “Allot’s solution allowed us to differentiate between the network resources consumed by various groups in the organization, and the result was that the organizational communication system was functioning continuously, but we also achieved greater stability of the network resources consumed by other departments in the organization, such as research and development, and we are now able to assign network resources between different user groups much more effectively.”
Benefits
Within the first 18 months of deploying Allot’s solution, Mellanox achieved a 10% improvement over the previous year in users’ QoE of its network and its VoIP communication applications. Mellanox is now able to:
- Assure application performance and user QoE
View, manage, and control application performance to maximize QoE for each of its user groups, particularly the business- critical VoIP applications, particularly Skype for Business
- Reduce bandwidth costs
By prioritizing business critical applications and rate-limiting others, Mellanox can save significantly on bandwidth costs
- Enhance and assure business productivity
Optimize bandwidth use with no disruption from over- blocking, enabling users to work smoothly
- Improve network efficiency
Helping Mellanox meet user expectations for service security, reliability and speed
- Troubleshoot faster
Quickly identify and fix problems from a central console, before they detrimentally impact business productivity and quality of service
