We are a small team. As much as we can automate, that is what we need to do. Between the Exinda appliance and our firewall, we put policies into place. If they need to be adjusted later on, that is great.

With Exinda, I log into it at least once a day, though I'm not on it all day long. We have reports automated to show usage. So, we can adjust that. We look at overall bandwidth, what's actually coming through, and how much of that is actually being prioritized.

The solution allows us to focus on application performance, rather than just “throttling” traffic and bandwidth. When I do this, I'll put an app out there just to peek here and there. For example, there is an application that our football team uses called "Huddle", which they use for scouting. They will also post their practices there. So, this is an essential tool that they use. When it's performing, it is all streaming video. and I keep watch over it. 

For athletics' streaming video, we do have a custom app that we put in there to monitor performance. It is cool that you can actually put a custom app in there. It's not just all the predefined stuff; you can create your own applications and monitor them. I don't do a whole lot of that, but I do it a little bit of it.

Exinda has enabled us to gain control over our network traffic. I don't know how I would control it otherwise. You can do some basic stuff, e.g., at the firewall level or switch level, where you can do quality of service. However, that doesn't touch on the granularity that you get with an optimizer, like Exinda, which allows you to go in there and and look at ranges of IP addresses. In my network, I have certain ranges for certain machines, e.g., classrooms fall in this range, my faculty and staff might fall on another range, and then students fall into another range. You can identify based on location essentially, then pull those computers out and give them priority. So, I know that during the day my classrooms will take priority. So, I'll just pull out that entire network range and bump it up a bit. That is something that we use it for a lot.

I use Exinda's dashboard to see what’s happening on our network. It allows us to look at our top applications, like the most prioritized and used applications, and look at what they are doing. For example, our current top applications are:

1. Xbox
2. Netflix
3. Hulu
4. YouTube
5. PlayStation Network
6. Amazon Prime Video 
7. iTunes 
8. FaceTime.

It really gives us an idea of what students are actually using. We can trend applications, and say, "This is what they're using today."

It used to be where everybody was downloading MP3s and movie files, now not so much. We only allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for that now, because torrenting invites a lot of sketchy stuff, like malware, which you do not want on your network. Aside from that, we are not allowing torrenting to take priority. If you don't want something there, you can even go ahead and drop the traffic as well. Though, I don't like using it so much like a firewall, then dropping the traffic.

We look at traffic patterns or how much it's being utilized during the day. You can definitely see in the morning that traffic is at an all time low. I have maybe 150 MB coming across my network, because early morning is just classroom activity. You're really only using the network for what is needed. If we don't have all the entertainment stuff and it was just simply work-related and academic-related, then we wouldn't really need that much bandwidth at all. However, as the day goes on, it'll get up between 500 to 800 MB. So, it'll get pretty high. 

We can also kind of look at our utilization during the day. I've used it before to make a decision on when is the best time to reboot network equipment, e.g., when are the fewest number of users going to be on the network. You get kind of creative with how you can use it, because now you're looking at utilization to start planning and your work maintenance. 

Exinda helps customers protect important business applications and control recreational internet use like streaming media and peer-to-peer apps.

The best benefit for us is on the troubleshooting side. You can stick it between you and another point of traffic. You can packet-capture some of that traffic and you can also see the traffic flow between the two devices. You can actually see what's going on and, as a result, we get involved less in arguments with customers. That makes customers happier. There is less arguing with customers regarding free ports and how the data is used, when you can actually produce a report for the customer. It has helped to reduce troubleshooting time a lot.

Also, when there is a satellite with a high latency, it helps to overcome some of that high latency.

Exinda has also enabled us to gain control over our network traffic, because some of our modems are not really that great at shaping. So if you stick the shaper in front of them, it's a little bit more gentle in dropping packets.

In addition, it has allowed us to maintain app performance without buying more bandwidth. For example, you can shape down traffic, like Windows updates. They will still work, even being fed in a trickle. You can prioritize all the work-related applications and therefore you can get more use out of your bandwidth, or you can customize it per customer.

It also enables us to repurpose bandwidth being consumed by rogue applications. While that doesn't save us any money, it makes us more competitive in the marketplace. A customer can either buy 50 Mb with us or 50 Mb with somebody else, but they'll get a 70 Mb feel with us because we can shape it a little bit better. It makes it less laggy.

Exinda allows us to provide better voice quality out to India over heavily utilized WAN links.

We are better able to control what individuals and different people on campus are doing. We can prioritize certain things to students, certain things to faculty, and certain things to staff, by application. Similarly, we can slow down and give less of a priority to things that aren't important to certain groups. For example, staff doesn't need to be able to watch Netflix in high-definition while they're working, but students might, because the college is their home. The ability to do that was the reason that we put it in.

We use the solution's dashboard to see what's happening in our network. We look at it every day, but we don't monitor it consistently unless we think there's an issue. But it does play a role in our ability to make decisions related to what we see. One of the great things for us is that the solution works, and it works whether you're looking at it or not. For us, the fact that it keeps going and does everything that we need it to do, while we only check on it once a day, is great.

Particularly with COVID, we were concerned about what the bandwidth use was going to be like and whether we were going to be able to handle the change and what it would mean to have people working remotely. And when we came back to classes in the fall, we were concerned about whether were we going to be able to have the bandwidth if people here on campus were going to be holding a class that needed to have a virtual component. We used the Exinda to watch that and monitor it, and ultimately show that we were fine. We changed some of the priorities in the Exinda on traffic for certain things, like Zoom, and it made the difference for us.

We have voice applications that need to be prioritized. The voice would be terrible without Exinda.

We can analyze the performance of the different applications. It's used as a troubleshooting tool. It makes it easier for us to improve the efficiency of our troubleshooting process. It allows us to see what's going on.

We needed a optimization product for our voice traffic that QoS alone could not accomplish for our low bandwidth sites. Getting Exinda was a life saver for our voice traffic