WAN Optimisation

The WAN optimisation solution is sometimes confused with other application acceleration products. With so many vendors claiming to provide “application acceleration” products, it is important to understand different approaches and their limitations.

Despite years of innovations in various areas of WAN performance, the throughput of applications over WANs has historically been quite poor. Some approaches focus on bandwidth expansion, some optimise specific protocols, some attack the problem through caching, and others by prioritising traffic. While compression, caching, QoS, WAFS, and other technologies have their place there are now fully-integrated solutions that address the multiple root-causes of poor application performance.

Alpha delivers you a complete solution to your wide area networking problems, by enabling WAN optimisation. By addressing all the key factors that slow application performance over WANs: high latency, limited bandwidth, “chatty” transport protocols, and even “chattier” applications. If you would like to review your options for enhancing your WANs performance call us now on 0800 112 3282 or complete the contact form and one of team will be happy to give you a no obligation explanation of the options available to you.

Understanding the common approaches to application acceleration:

Wide Area File Sharing (WAFS)

WAFS Stores files locally in order to avoid requests going across the WAN but only supports files and file sharing so isn’t applicable to Application acceleration.

Compression

Compression Applies algorithms to data in order to decrease the volume of data moving across the WAN. Depending on the type of data this may onl provide limited bandwidth savings and issues of Consistency and data security need to be seriously considered.

Protocol Optimisation

Protocol Optimisation Modifies the behaviour of TCP traffic across the enterprise WAN. This does not address transport or application protocol inefficiencies and tends to result in limited performance gains

Caching

Caching Stores local copies of files or objects so requests can be served locally. This generally only works for one application and provides very little bandwidth reduction. This also typically greatly increases the complexity of network infrastructure and is subject to consistency problems

Web Application Acceleration

Web Application Acceleration Offloads requests from a web server by storing commonly requested objects on another server. This clearly only works for Web-based applications and due to the underlying technologies may be subject to security problems

Beware the Bolt-on Approach

Many vendors have realised that their above approaches don’t always meet the enterprise needs of many organisations and then have tried to partner with other companies or acquired other technologies in order to add extra functionality. The problem with this approach, however, is that these combined products often still have limited functionality and can be incredibly complex to manage. Furthermore, these vendors face the challenge of integrating multiple disparate architectures, leading to a haphazard, inconsistent approach to accelerating applications.

Look Beyond the Standard Checklist

With some vendors incrementally adding functionality, it is seemingly getting harder to differentiate one application acceleration provider from another. In order to do so, you can use a few simple criteria:

• How fast can the product accelerate the applications that you care about the most? -- Don’t let vendors tell you what applications are the most important; you should tell them.
• Go beyond the top-level check -- Vendors like to claim they have ‘fully functional’ features when they often have just scratched the surface. For example, consider CIFS protocol acceleration. If a vendor says they have CIFS acceleration, explore further and understand what they mean by that: Can they accelerate folder copying as well as file copying? Can they accelerate browsing as well as file reads? What about accelerating CIFS from within Microsoft Office applications? And what about accelerating CIFS from within non-Microsoft applications? 
• How easy is it to deploy the product? -- Make sure vendors have designed in functionality such as transparent deployment, auto-discovery, and central management so that you don’t have to spend significant amounts of time monitoring your acceleration devices.