Intown Suites uses Exinda to Improve Guest Experience

InTown Suites, a low-cost resort chain, had a trouble with customers of file discussing purposes who were ingesting all of its network bandwidth. Right here’s how they solved the issue.

Primarily based in Atlanta, InTown Suites has 139 attributes close to the country that use T-1 lines to website link to a Cisco-powered digital personal community. InTown Suites delivers its company with free high-speed Web entry, but the bandwidth was becoming gobbled up by users of document sharing functions.

\”We had been having troubles with guests file sharing using applications like BitTorrent and LimeWire,\” explained Stephen Bell, Director of IT for InTown Suites. \”We would have one guest who would be document sharing, and that document discussing software would make so several connectors that it would saturate the bandwidth on our T-1 and influence every other visitor at that property.\”

Worse, InTown Suites employees couldn\’t entry key web-based purposes this kind of as time and attendance and procurement due to the fact their T-1 lines were clogged. InTown Suites tried obstructing the IP and MAC addresses for the guests who were engaged in document sharing, but that didn\’t perform for long

\”Most of these guests were savvy adequate that they\’d assign themselves an additional IP handle or MAC address from Dynamic Variety Configuration Protocol, so we just journeyed back again and forth with the struggle,\” Bell mentioned.

InTown Suites didn\’t want to commit dollars on added bandwidth because they thought it would just be used by the friends who have been working file discussing apps. Rather, the manufacturer regarded for a network appliance that would determine and obstruct the document discussing targeted visitors that was triggering trouble.

\”These document sharing applications are very difficult to identify due to the fact this particular site visitors disguises alone as anything else,\” Bell said. \”We necessary one thing that would glimpse at the traffic and determine the traffic for what it actually was.\”

Bell evaluated two devices that could do full packet inspection: Packeteer (now owned by Pink Coat) and Exinda. Bell stated the Exinda machine was a better fit for his needs.

\”The Packeteer did what it was supposed to do,\” Bell explained. \”It allowed us to isolate the workplace side from the visitor facet, prioritise the workplace side and deal with the visitor aspect bandwidth so it was much more equitable. What it didn\’t do was particularly determine packets and prohibit the traffic that we wished to stop. Exinda was a much far better answer for our particular dilemma.\”

InTown Suites invested around $250,000 to buy an Exinda machine for each and every of its places. The producer utilizes these devices to prioritize office traffic and to stop peer-to-peer site visitors.

Bell stated the Exinda gadgets had been easy ample to configure and set up that the company could use onsite employees somewhat than flying IT personnel out to each area for installation.

Thank you to the improved bandwidth management from the Exinda devices, InTown Suites is putting all of its voice and information visitors on built-in T-1 traces at each of its properties, which are being furnished by Qwest.

\”The folks in the places are delighted about not getting to struggle this continual fight that the World wide web is straight down and several guests are complaining and it\’s all because one visitor is carrying out some thing nefarious,\” Bell mentioned. \”On the guest aspect, we get a few issues but it\’s ordinarily individuals who are making an attempt to file share.\”

Given that the Exinda devices were installed this year, the amount of visitor complaints about sluggish Web company has slipped 95%, Bell estimates.

\”Guest-side Web concerns have been our range one helpdesk request at the corporate office, and that is no longer true,\” Bell stated. \”Our quantity one return on this investment is guest satisfaction. Then add to that…us not possessing to buy further bandwidth.\”

The desire for relaxed packet inspection is rising for all sorts of enterprises, not just hospitality companies like InTown Suites, states Phil Hochmuth, a senior analyst with Yankee Group.

\”To seriously get at what is going on with a lot of these new document sharing or Web 2.0 applications, you have to crack open up the packets to see what\’s in the stream and that requires a deeper level of intelligence,\” Hochmuth says. \”It gets a little bit of a bad rap…but a lot of enterprises are seeking at this.\”

Hochmuth says the cost of application-layer inspection units is arriving straight down, thanks to quicker, more affordable processors.

\”These technologies can be deployed a lot more broadly, not just at your data middle or just at your most essential link,\” Hochmuth provides. \”Folks want deeper info about what kind of traffic is working over their networks, and they want it in additional places.\”