WAN Acceleration: The Sleeper Technology Changing IT’s Approach To Everything
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 99 viewsThere is a lot of buzz in the IT industry about WAN acceleration technology these days. WAN acceleration is about improving the performance of business applications over WAN connections. WAN acceleration technology can improve most company’s application response times, particularly where network latency is high.
WAN acceleration technology vastly improves application performance by reducing the amount of information that needs to be sent across a wide area network. WAN acceleration offers these advantages: It eliminates redundant data transmission (a huge advantage), because during data replication much of the replicated data remains unchanged. It also simplifies IT management by using the same support contract and providing transparency of services Dedicated hardware and software-Invest in a solution that uses dedicated hardware and software to perform WAN acceleration without affecting voice, data, and security tasks. This feature is important because it allows IT organizations to deploy WAN acceleration appliances without making any changes to user PCs, network infrastructure, or applications.
A true transparent solution should offer all of the following capabilities: Application transparency- This capability makes deployment fast and easy because no initial and ongoing changes are needed for end-user PCs and applications Interception transparency-This capability allows fast and easy deployment because neither the client nor the server is aware of the existence of the WAN acceleration devices in the path Preservation of industry-standard NetFlow policy Preservation of router access control lists (ACLs) Preservation of firewall policies Preservation of quality of service (QoS)-Without IP header transparency, QoS and associated features may need to be reconfigured if the packet header information is overwritten Preservation of Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR)-NBAR is a protocol discovery and classification technique that relies on visibility to application data. Although WAN acceleration is crucial for delivering applications to the branch office, it should be an integral part of the overall application delivery infrastructure. Consequently, there is a large and growing market for WAN acceleration hardware, with business networks wanting to lower latency, manage quality of service (QoS) for critical and recreational applications, and increase performance. WAN acceleration is a critical enabler for networks aiming to achieve higher throughput and productivity.
In the past, the myth that “ordering more Network bandwidth will solve my problems” was the general response when a business was facing slow application performance across the wide area network. This response was due in part because there were limited options for IT staff to try and improve application performance without increasing Network bandwidth. Application performance issues for remote users, data center consolidation, the growing number of distributed branch offices, and the desire to avoid costly WAN bandwidth upgrades are just a few of the business drivers increasing demand for WAN acceleration and application acceleration solutions. Here are a few key areas that WAN acceleration can really help with:
- Disaster Recovery
- Reduce WAN Bandwidth
- Network Growth and Management
The study, entitled “Optimizing Application Delivery over the WAN,” reveals that Best-in-Class organizations are leveraging WAN acceleration solutions to improve the delivery of business-critical applications and increasing these investments at a significantly higher rate than their overall IT spend. “Our findings show that WAN acceleration is most effective for meeting organizations’ bandwidth and application delivery needs, and that deploying WAN acceleration as a managed service can have even greater benefits, especially when it comes to consistent network monitoring and cost savings.
