How we work alongside Microsoft P2P, Downloading and Caching Technology
At 2Pint Software we noticed that although the various P2P technologies are awesome at what they do, there were some obvious areas for improvement. Firstly, the manner in which the content is downloaded (bandwidth control) and secondly, how many machines actually need to download that content from remote data sources onto the local site or subnet before sharing it at the local level. (Single Site Download)
Microsoft P2P solutions use several delivery protocols which by default are difficult to control at a granular level. Taking BITS (BranchCache) as an example: An Administrator can set maximum bandwidth usage for various BITS job priorities but those priorities can only to be set at a very high level and over a wide variety of distribution types which may not necessarily align with your Network or Management requirements. In the case of User initiated Configuration Manager Jobs, control is virtually removed entirely and these are automatically set to Foreground Priority (use all available bandwidth) which has no respect for Bandwidth Limits and will push other (possibly more important) jobs down the queue. The StifleR client agent returns control and allows an Administrator to set priority levels for content download down to specific job types and delivers the ability to centrally adjust and tweak those settings down to an individual job level.
But Job Priority is just half the challenge. The Job Priority settings only enable an Administrator to set a maximum bandwidth level for a download (which unmanaged clients will use if unchecked). If all clients are trying to download content from a remote data centre over a low bandwidth connection, it doesn’t take long for the expensive WAN link to become congested and for your users to start suffering a loss of production data.
StifleR to the rescue! Not only does StifleR allow you to set the priority, and therefore the bandwidth available to a certain content transfer, it also monitors latency during a download and will dynamically adjust the download transfer rate up or down in order to keep the bandwidth usage within configurable QoS limits and allow business critical data to flow without interruption.
Controlling the bandwidth consumed by your individual clients when they are downloading content is fine to a point but if there are a large number of clients that all need to download content at same time then the sheer weight of numbers can quickly overwhelm a highly utilised link.
StifleR provides a solution to this problem through the concept of the Red and Blue leaders. There’s a lot more about this later on in this document but, in a nutshell, it works by the most suitable client in a subnet being dynamically appointed to be the only client for that location to download the content from the remote source. This “Leader” client alone is allowed to make full use of the priority bandwidth for the download thus delivering the content to the local network in the quickest time. The other clients will throttle down and wait for the content to be available. Once the content has been downloaded to the “Red Leader” client on the local network, Microsoft P2P bandwidth accelerating caching technologies enable that content to be shared efficiently with other clients on the LAN, leaving the WAN link clear for your business critical production traffic.
In StifleR Enterprise, this concept is further enhanced and expanded to the Site level with the introduction of Blue Leaders. Blue Leaders communicate with each other over Subnet boundaries. They pick up local broadcast discovery requests and pass these on to other Blue Leaders which can then rebroadcast those messages onto their local network thus allowing the sharing of content with and between all the clients at a multi subnet location. The end result of this infrastructure is that content may be downloaded once over the WAN for an entire remote site with that content then shared directly between Peers on the well connected LAN.
StifleR optimises WAN Bandwidth usage and ensures that your Users and Workstations obtain the content that they need from a source local to them in the most efficient way possible, while protecting network bandwidth, prioritizing traffic, and giving real-time visibility and control over your Software Distributions through the StifleR Dashboards.
‘StifleR – How to be the Network team’s best friend in 5 minutes or less’
Would you get onto an airplane knowing that Air Traffic Control Radar wasn’t working? Of course not! Without StifleR your WAN and LAN traffic is ‘flying blind’ with little control over speed or priority. Without monitoring or control, how do you know if your Users aren’t choking the corporate network, downloading or streaming mundane or personal content and blocking high priority business traffic such as your Point-of-Sale data or critical Windows Updates? StifleR delivers the ability to centrally monitor and dynamically control these data streams.
StifleR-assisted content delivery quickly decreases the bandwidth load on your network. The greater the number of StifleR enabled clients across an enterprise, the more efficient content delivery becomes.
Microsoft clearly sees P2P as the future of content delivery and so should you!
StifleR has been built around the awesome Microsoft Content Distribution and Peer to Peer Caching technologies that are now an integral part of Microsoft’s preferred delivery solutions. BranchCache is the mature WAN Accelerator that’s been built into the Windows operating systems for over 7 years. In Windows 10, StifleR gives you the power to manage Delivery Optimization (DO) which is now the download and cache engine of choice for that platform and for Microsoft distributed content in general. SifleR also manages and enhances the performance of Microsoft Configuration Manager Client Peer Cache which is the solution specifically designed for CM content delivery. Now with Windows Server 2016, StifleR gives you control and visibility over Microsoft’s latency optimized, network congestion control provider called LEDBAT, which stands for Low Extra Delay Background Transfer. LEDBAT is designed to automatically yield bandwidth to users and applications, but is able to utilise the entire bandwidth available and allocate any extra to background services.
StifleR is built on Microsoft’s SignalR which is a massively scalable lightweight platform for real-time network wide communications which enables up to the moment monitoring and end point control between Servers and consumers.
By uniting and giving you control over these various technologies we built a solution that can pamper, whittle, slice and dice your content delivery from the CEO’s Surface Book all the way to the remotest of remote Locations. You have full control and visibility over Windows Updates, Applications, Office files, CM Content even your users personal content streaming, all in real time.