WAN Optimizaton: What's the buzz about?

Wikipedia definition: "WAN optimization controllers 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."

Ok, well it sounds interesting but I think we need to dive into this definition in more detail to truly understand what this means and how it affects you. As you already know, wide area networks generally consist of extremely slow links and connections that interconnect branch offices, vendors, partners as well as mobile workers. Even with WAN bandwidth costs dropping on a daily basis, these links and connections are still extremely expensive.

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"The statistics say it all! Our overall WAN bandwidth reduction was 85% with the Steelheads in place." - Robert Osborne, Mooresville Consolidated Schools Corp. "Riverbed is reducing my Citrix printing traffic by 70%! The users have given me great feedback." - Doug Cornell, Western Oilfields Supply Co. / Rain For Rent "Tredent went to bat for us to get the discounts we needed to get the entire project within our budget!" - Tony Pellegrini, Apollo Professional Solutions, Inc.

As corporate applications become more and more critical to the survival and growth of the business' bottom line, IT departments face tough decisions about how to deliver more applications with better WAN performance to all of the end users. These concerns have slowly grown to be huge challenges for IT managers and directors over the past 2 years.

In the past, the myth that "ordering more network bandwidth will solve my problems" was the general response when a business was facing slow application performance across the wide area network. This response was due in part because there were limited options for IT professionals to try and improve application performance without increasing WAN bandwidth. This problem has created the opportunity for someone to develop an alternative solution to improve application performance and enhance the use of the current wide area network without increasing bandwidth.

The evil doer is actually TCP. Ok, maybe its not an evil doer. It's intention is good but TCP's activity can wreak havoc in the hearts and minds of IT personnel that are trying to deliver a reliable application experience to end users across the corporate wide area network. Because TCP's main goal is to make sure that packets reliably reach the other end of the connection, it will go to all extremes necessary to ensure that packets were delivered successfully. Even at the expense of application performance. TCP will happily use all available WAN bandwidth, in a very bursty and inconsistent manner. TCP's control mechanism to reduce congestion is to slowly start sending traffic, and then increase the traffic until packet loss occurs. When that packet loss happens, the lost data must be retransmitted, creating even more congestion. Sounds like a lose-lose scenario? You bet it does! That's why you need WAN optimization appliances!

Many enterprises choose to optimize their wide area network in order to cut costs and to minimize WAN congestion. But using a typical WAN optimizer will only reduce network traffic by 10% to 20%. In contrast, Riverbed WAN optimizers can typically reduce network utilization by 60 to 95%!

Riverbed WAN acceleration appliances remove repetitive traffic from your wide area network through patent-pending data streamlining algorithms. Data streamlining stores your WAN traffic on disk in a proprietary, application independent form that can be reused by any application, any file or any user that sends or receives the same data. Whether a client requests a file that has been renamed, emails an attachment or uses another application like FTP or a web based application, any traffic that is generated that has been across the WAN before will not be retransmitted.

Instead, only 16k packets that refer to the data are sent to the Riverbed WAN optimizer on the other side of the wide area network. Riverbed's WAN optimization references are 16 bytes in length, yet can represent megabytes of data. This results in extremely high levels of WAN bandwidth optimization. This is one of Riverbed's WAN optimizing secret weapons!

Unlike most WAN optimization products, Riverbed WAN optimization appliances deliver much more than reduced network traffic. Riverbed WAN optimization appliances not only provide the best WAN optimization available in the marketplace, but also improve the throughput of your critical applications. Most of Riverbed's competitors that are focused on network optimization do not offer true application acceleration, another animal in itself. Riverbed Steelhead appliances are the best of breed solution for both WAN optimization and application acceleration.

For more information on WAN optimization solutions or if you would like to evaluate Riverbed's WAN accelerator appliances in your production environment free of charge, please contact us below.

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