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Burstable bandwidth is a method of delivering bandwidth that allows customers to exceed their designated allocation for short periods. It is intended to help businesses deal with traffic spikes without having to overprovision or deal with unpredictable costs. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know about it.
Burstable bandwidth has become popular due to the significant benefits it delivers to data center customers. Here is an overview of its three main attractions.
Burstable bandwidth provides the flexibility to scale network resources according to varying business needs. This is crucial for businesses with fluctuating traffic patterns, such as those experiencing seasonal variations or hosting periodic events.
The ability to handle unexpected increases in traffic without preemptive investment in additional fixed bandwidth allows businesses to grow and adapt quickly to changing demands, ensuring they can support both current and future requirements without significant infrastructure changes.
With burstable bandwidth, businesses can maintain optimal performance during temporary spikes in traffic. This is particularly important for online services, e-commerce sites, and streaming platforms that experience sudden increases in user activity.
Burstable bandwidth ensures that during these high-demand periods, the network can temporarily increase its capacity, thus preventing slowdowns or service interruptions and ensuring a seamless user experience.
Businesses utilizing burstable bandwidth benefit from enhanced network monitoring and management capabilities. Providers typically offer detailed usage reports and analytics tools, allowing businesses to track their bandwidth usage, identify peak times, and plan accordingly.
This level of insight helps businesses optimize their network performance, anticipate future needs, and make informed decisions about their bandwidth requirements.
Here is an overview of the key elements of burstable bandwidth delivery mechanisms.
Burstable bandwidth operates within a framework where a base bandwidth allocation is provided to the user, typically defined in terms of a committed information rate (CIR). This CIR represents the minimum guaranteed bandwidth that the user can continuously utilize without any additional charges.
In addition to the CIR, burstable bandwidth arrangements include a burst allowance, often termed as the excess burst size (EBS) or burstable rate. This represents the maximum bandwidth that the user can momentarily utilize beyond the CIR without incurring additional charges. The burst allowance is specified in terms of a burst duration and a burst size.
The token bucket algorithm is commonly employed to regulate burstable bandwidth usage. In this mechanism, the network provider maintains a token bucket that fills up at a rate corresponding to the CIR.
Each token in the bucket represents a unit of bandwidth. When a user transmits data, tokens are consumed from the bucket at a rate corresponding to the data rate. If tokens are available, data transmission is allowed; otherwise, the transmission is limited until tokens accumulate.
Bursting conditions are typically governed by policies set by the network provider. When traffic exceeds the CIR, the user can utilize the burst allowance if tokens are available in the token bucket. If the burst allowance is exhausted or if the user exceeds the burst duration, additional bandwidth consumption may either be limited to the CIR or subject to additional charges, depending on the provider’s policies.
Network providers monitor bandwidth usage based on the tokens consumed from the token bucket. Billing is often based on a combination of the CIR and any additional burst usage, with charges applied for burst usage beyond the burst allowance or burst duration. This metering and billing system ensures that users are billed fairly based on their actual bandwidth consumption.
Your experience of using burstable bandwidth is likely to depend greatly on the quality of the provider that delivers it to you. With that in mind, here are the three key factors you should check when choosing a burstable bandwidth provider.
Evaluate the provider’s burstable bandwidth offering in terms of the allocated burst allowance and burst duration. Ensure that the burst allowance aligns with your business’s requirements for handling temporary traffic spikes, and verify that the burst duration is sufficient for accommodating peak usage periods without incurring additional charges or performance degradation.
Assess the provider’s QoS guarantees, particularly regarding latency, packet loss, and jitter. Ensure that the provider can maintain consistent performance levels, even during burstable bandwidth usage. QoS mechanisms such as traffic prioritization and traffic shaping are essential for ensuring reliable service delivery, especially in scenarios with fluctuating traffic patterns.
Examine the provider’s network infrastructure for redundancy and reliability measures. Look for features such as redundant links, failover mechanisms, and geographic diversity to minimize the risk of downtime or service interruptions. A reliable network infrastructure is critical for maintaining continuous connectivity and ensuring high availability, even during unexpected events or network failures.
Because we are continually asking our customers what they want and need, we thought it would be both informative and fun for DataBank to reveal some of the key questions our customers or potential customers commonly ask us.
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