WAN Optimisation Overview

 

WAN optimisation (also referred to as WAN acceleration) products seek to accelerate a broad range of applications accessed by distributed enterprise users via eliminating redundant transmissions, staging data in local caches, compressing and prioritizing data, and streamlining chatty protocols (e.g., CIFS – Microsoft Network File Sharing). WAN optimisation also helps avoid packet delivery issues common in shared WAN environments, like MPLS and Internet VPNs.

WAN acceleration reduces the amount of traffic sent across the Wide Area Network (WAN) and delivers information locally whenever possible.  This improves the costs associated with application delivery – from staffing, infrastructure and facility costs to expenditures in application software and WAN bandwidth.  In addition, WAN acceleration protects investments in business critical applications by ensuring that they meet end user performance objectives, and it minimizes risk of exposure by improving the performance and reliability of data backup, replication and recovery.  As a result, WAN acceleration provides an extremely rapid return on investment, plus the intangible benefit of increased end user productivity and unsurpassed IT satisfaction.

 

 

Benefits of WAN Optimisation

 

• Improve the Performance and Reliability of Disaster Recovery – Disaster recovery can be particularly difficult to achieve across a Wide Area Network (WAN).  For one, backup, replication and recovery involve the transfer of entire volumes of data, which require a significant amount of WAN bandwidth.  In addition, many business continuity tasks react poorly when in the presence of high latency, resulting in application timeouts and subsequent database synchronization problems.

 

WAN acceleration overcomes these challenges by reducing the amount of data sent across the WAN during the backup, replication, and restore processes, and delivering information locally whenever possible to accelerate application response time.  In addition, TCP acceleration and Quality of Service (QoS) help overcome other bandwidth and latency challenges that often plague disaster recovery initiatives.

 

• Improve Application Performance across the WAN – There are inherent limitations associated with Wide Area Networks that make it difficult to deliver business critical applications to remote and branch offices.  Bandwidth is limited and costly to provide, latency occurs when communication is taking place over long geographic distances, and network congestion can lead to packet loss.  The back-off mechanisms incorporated within TCP, coupled with the “chatty” behavior of common application protocols, such as CIFS, further exacerbate the situation. The result is poor application response time in many enterprise WAN environments.  By overcoming these limitations, WAN acceleration can improve employee productivity and protect investments in business critical applications while save on ongoing support costs and WAN bandwidth expenditures.

 

• Facilitate Data Center Consolidation - According to recent Computerworld and Ziff Davis surveys, over 80% of enterprises are either exploring branch office infrastructure consolidation projects, or have already taken steps towards this goal.  By facilitating the centralization of servers and storage, WAN acceleration can save a significant amount of money in infrastructure costs, software investments, WAN bandwidth, and day-to-day operational expenditures.