Bandwidth Management of Remote Connections

Bandwidth Management is a measure employed in communication networks to regulate network traffic and minimize network congestion. SA’s remote site management model typically uses a Satellite configuration that deploys a remote gateway on every logical location (for example, a branch office) to handle connections to remote servers and manage the network bandwidth of these connections. However, the cost effectiveness of this configuration is significantly reduced for sites that manage only a few servers.

A new SA bandwidth management capability eliminates the need to install a Satellite for remote locations with only a few servers. SA provides the Bandwidth Configuration Management (BCM) tool to control the bandwidth used by Agent or Satellite Gateways when communicating with remote servers.

You can push bandwidth configurations to a peer group by using the BCM tool. After the configuration is pushed to the peers, it is saved to file. During Gateway startup, the configuration is loaded from this file and synchronized with the peers. When a client negotiates a connection through the SA Gateway mesh to connect to a remote TCP service, the client then has a TCP connection to the ingress Gateway. Also, there is a TCP connection leaving the egress Gateway to the remote service.

When the proxy connection through the Gateway mesh is established, the peer addresses of ingress/egress connections are classified, and a runtime queue is created for each classification. At this point, bandwidth throttling is in effect for these connections. The corresponding queue is updated with the bandwidth usage information as the data flows through the connection. The bandwidth usage information is also shared among the peer group so that the local queue can be updated on each gateway cluster. The data can flow through that connection till the maximum bandwidth allowed is reached. Queue bandwidth usage information is reset at a one-second interval.

All Agent Gateways in the same Realm must also be running the same SA version in order to participate in Agent Gateway bandwidth negotiation and communication. Mixed core configurations (core and satellites running a different SA version) is not supported.