Cisco WAAS Exposed!

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

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Alright, this is the Wide Optimization chalk talk. My name is Apurva. I’m from Riverbed Technology. You’re probably already wondering what the heck is WAN acceleration anyway. What your business buys have realized just yet is that your whole business today depends on your network and the applications that run across it.

Headquarters. It’s always been there. It’s always going to be there. But that’s not where most of the action is happening nowadays. Nowadays you have the ever present ubiquitous branch office. It’s in Singapore, it’s in Malaysia, it’s in London. It’s wherever you need to be in order to get the job done for your customers. And let’s face it, headquarters and the branch office, they’re not off in their own separate worlds or, oh, wait a minute, they are. At least today they are.

Now in truth people have connected these locations via wide area network. The wide area network may be satellite, maybe a typical land line. It could be a new fancy MPLS network, the best in class. But it sure doesn’t seem like the headquarters and the branch office works together today efficiently. What are some of the problems we have?

Let’s face it, the biggest problem we have is speed. It’s really slow to get any type of application or data across the network today. So what do people do? They take a small amount of band width and they spend a lot of money and buy more band width. Does that really solve the problem? Sometimes.

What else is going on here? Well, the IT guys who are responsible for making sure that this branch office can talk to the headquarters says, well, we have a server over here, we’ve got email over here. Why don’t we put those systems out over here. That seems like a pretty good idea cause now they’ve got their own server and their own email, that must be pretty fast. It’s true. That is pretty fast, right? You’ve got local performance. But guess what? These branch office employees still need to talk to the headquarters. So what else do you do to try and improve the performance of your network and your applications today?

Well, there were a bunch of other systems and tools that you could use in order to try and improve it. Number one is a cashing system. It’s basically making copies of files. You might also use a QOS or Quality of Service system, could be separate, could be built into your routers. It kind of all depends on how your network is structured. But let’s face it, what all of this does is add a lot of complexity to what should be a relatively simple problem.

You’ve got an office here and an office here and they should be connected together with a WAN, right? Right. So how do we get back to basics, how do we get back to simplicity and say we want our employees no matter where they are in the world to be able to communicate, to be able to collaborate, to make all of our offices work like one office. That’s the idea of WAN optimization technology. So let’s start talking about WAN acceleration, what it is and how it solves this problem.

Without getting too technical in terms of definitions and theories and so on and so forth, wide area data services is a combination of application, storage and networking technology that let you do a few things. With wide area data services applications can go up to 100 times faster and at the same time band width use is reduced by 60 to 95%. Those are some pretty big claims. Let’s get into the technology and see how it actually works.

True wide area data services solutions are appliance-based hardware-software combined models that sit both at the branch office and at the data center. By sitting in both places they see all of the data that moves across your network and they understand the key protocols used across the network. So here they can do two important things. With a WAN accelerator solution in place we start to see a few things happen across the wide area network that didn’t happen before.

First of all, let’s think about the data as it’s typically moving across your network. You’ve got a user over here. Let’s draw in a user. And that user is requesting data. They’re requesting files, they’re accessing applications. It doesn’t matter if they’re web-based applications, if they’re typical Microsoft Office applications, if they’re email attachments, whatever. They’re requesting that across the network.

The typical thing that happens in your network is a ping pong affect or a chatty application protocol which requires many round trips in order to send that information back and forth. What does this mean? Let me put it into a few numbers that probably make sense for you.

Imagine requesting a 10 meg word document across a wide area network. Hey, that’s not so big nowadays. If you were doing that from the U.S. to, say, London, that could take over 31 minutes. Why? Well, most people would say it’s that first problem we laid out. It’s that wide area network bandwidth. It’s just not enough. But the truth is, even if you had plenty of band width, this problem, the chatty application protocol, would still limit the performance of that application significantly.

So you have to address both the issue of band width constraints in the wide area network as well as the issues of the application and transport protocols and how they send information back and forth if you want to improve performance of the wide area network.

Let’s face it, all of these WAN optimizers, these cashing and QOS and compression accelerators, they’re all trying to do the same thing but they’re taking a really narrow approach. If you don’t address all of these issues at the same time, how can you really guarantee that you’re going to improve the performance for your end users? You can’t. So let’s erase this and let’s make our applications perform the way we want them to perform.