Cisco WAAS Exposed!

“Warning! Do Not Deploy WAN Acceleration Until You Read Every Word Of This Controversial Report”

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Fang Mang: Hello everyone. I’m Fang Mang. I’m with Urshit Parikh, director of product marketing for Cisco WAAS. Today, we’re here to introduce Cisco WAAS Mobile, the new solution. Urshit, can you tell us a little bit about this new solution?

Urshit: Sure, Fang. Cisco WAAS Mobile is a software solution that installs on PC’s and really makes the VPN connections much faster. If I’m a user working at some company and I’m on the road or I’m working from home and I’m accessing the network through a VPN connection, what WAAS Mobile will do is it will make my applications run much faster. Your emails will get downloaded much faster, web browsing will be faster. I can share my documents much more easily in real time with my colleagues, as well as I can use my productivity tools and applications like SAP, Oracle, or ERP systems much more efficiently and effectively.

Fang: So, really it really expands the capabilities of Cisco WAAS. So, mobile users can now get the same benefits.

Urshit: Exactly. What it does is, Cisco WAAS appliances make applications run fast for you when users aren’t inside the branch office. Cisco WAAS Mobile extends the same benefits for users which are outside the office.

Fang: Let’s talk about some of the challenges specifically around mobile users. How are they different from their branch user?

Urshit: Sure. Actually, the environment for optimizing… Writing of optimization software for mobile users has really pretty big unique challenges which are not there when you’re trying to write software for optimization on appliances. So, the first challenge ends up being the fact that the PC is really a shared platform. From the software that runs inside an appliance, the appliance is dedicated. However, the PC is running multiple applications at the same time. So, you need to ensure that the optimization software doesn’t end up consuming all the CPU and memory resources that may be on a device. The second challenge that you find in a mobile environment is that the Internet connection quality is significantly lower than what you would find in a branch office. You’re dealing with DSL, Broadband, sometimes Satellite, cellular e-video connections. So, these are connections which have high packet loss, high latency, many hops. Then, the users are all accessing the network through different connections at each time, which has its own unique challenges.Finally, the support requirements and the manageability deployment requirements for a PC client solution are very different from what it takes to deploy an appliance in a remote office.

Fang: OK. So, speaking of the challenges in mobile environments: what are the three things that really set the solution apart from other alternatives?

Urshit: With Cisco WAAS mobile, we have three really strong differentiators. The first is, this is a solution which is purpose-built for the Windows Environment. The result is it offers excellent reliability. We have customers and users telling us that they have gone for months using the solution without having to restart the application. This is really to do with the fact that in supporting some appliance software into a PC Windows environment, we build a solution, which will work pretty well on Windows machines. So, that is the first differentiator. The second of the solution offers the best performance compared to competitive products with regards to accelerating applications. We have this thing benchmarked across a wide range of solutions and the result is that you’ll find that applications and tasks which would take minutes now take seconds. They will take seconds even when the RAM links will be really bad. There are solutions where 10 percent packet loss which may happen in the satellite network, you may get one fourth of your bandwidth performance. But, in a WAAS mobile, you are still getting almost your full bandwidth for the connection.And finally, we have a wide range of tools, which significantly simplify deployment. You can include this in whatever is your standard process - standard tools that you use to deploy applications on PC’s. They are centralized qualities with management, centralized monitoring, one-click trouble shooting. You have interoperability checking such that you don’t have the problem where the client installs on the PC only to find that there were some inter operability issues between what was already on the PC and the client. The knack there is that you end up having the lowest cost from a deployment and support perspective.

Fang: How easy it is to install Cisco WAAS mobile.

Urshit: Cisco WAAS mobile is pretty easy. The users can just install it on their own you can deploy it from a centralized software distribution system. Let me give you an example. We had recently a large customer; a large insurance company who had and deployed the solution. The result was that the network operations team felt that it was just really uneventful to roll out to hundreds of users. It went very smoothly. At the same time, the end users were just happy because they were saving so much time. It was as if they were in the corporate office while they were really on the road working through all the claims and things like that that they were processing.

Fang: OK, what about the server side? Is it also easy to install?

Urshit: Yes. The server side sits next to your repine concentrators and it’s a very flexible solution from a deployment perspective that way.

Fang: OK, that’s great. So, the solution, like we said, is purpose built for a PC environment. As a result, it offers industry leading performance. It requires the smallest footprint in computing resources on the PC and, therefore, offers the lowest total cost of ownership. With that, Urshit, I would like to thank you for your time.