application accelerator - WAN optimization

WANs connect remote offces to central offces, allowing a major physical presence in multiple locations without sacrificing corporate computing power; WANs directly connect smaller branch offces with headquarters, enabling them to perform big-offce tasks with more cost-effective staff; and the next-generation WANs enable mobile workers to become highly productive in the field by tapping into the main corporate offce.

Tese regional, branch and mobile workforces require increasingly sophisticated applications and services to perform productively. Some or all of this remote access should travel over public networks. As computing continues to expand beyond the comfortable confines of the corporate firewall, a number of security, performance, and productivity issues should be addressed if corporations are to achieve a secure and demonstrable return on their WAN investments. Tese WAN connections, due to the increasing complexity and bandwidth demands of sofware applications, will become more and more crowded over time. Te trend is toward more traffic and more congestion.

Within wide area data services there are actually several technologies. WAN optimization is one and it's typically inline compression or a deduplication of a stream of data that you're sending over a WAN.

So, this optimizes your bandwidth or reduces your traffic, and gives users at remote locations more performance or reduces the amount of data you're transmitting to remote locations.

WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) can breathe new life into slow wide area network links, relieving congestion, speeding up file transfers and making applications more responsive. These most commonly used techniques include:

Caching: When a file is transferred over a WAN, say from a head office to a branch office, a copy of it is cached by the branch office's WOC.

Compression: It tackles the problem of limited bandwidth by reducing the amount of data that has to be sent over the WAN using a variety of data compression techniques.

Data reduction: a WOC using data reduction examines data as it travels over the WAN, and stores data it receives.

Latency reduction: CIFS are frequently  used when remote disks are browsed and files are transferred across a WAN, but the protocol was never really intended for use over high latency links.

Quality of Service (QoS) tagging: Traffic is identified, usually by its application, source, or destination, and given a priority for transmission over the WAN.

Packet coalescing: Saves bandwidth by consolidating multiple packets into a single (coalesced) packet, with a single header. This can make save considerable amounts of bandwidth, especially in applications like VoIP.

Market leaders: Blue Coat Systems, Riverbed Technology

Since all of the vendors in this space, including Riverbed Technology Inc., F5 Networks Inc., Blue Coat Systems Inc., Packeteer (which has been acquired by Blue Coat), Cisco Systems Inc., among others, have hundreds -- if not thousands -- of customers each, many companies have found that they can consolidate file and application services with almost zero impact to remote users. Customers should choose the type and extent of WAN optimization needed rather than be bound by vendors’ requirements. Secure, reliable WAN
acceleration should cover the entire WAN—from handheld devices, to servers, and to individual desktops if necessary. Finally, WAN optimization should dynamically handle any WAN condition without the need for complex configuration.