WAN Acceleration: The Sleeper Technology Changing IT’s Approach To Everything
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WAN acceleration technology key feature is improving performance of applications across enterprise wide area networks. WAN acceleration technology can improve most company’s application response times, particularly where network latency is high. WAN acceleration hardware allows IT to do things that previously would never have been possible. Working with a good partner will ensure that your WAN acceleration deployment goes as smoothly as possible.
WAN acceleration hardware is essential to deliver fast and reliable application performance for locations across the globe. Once this technology is in place, application performance enhancements do vary depending on the application type that is being accelerated. If disaster recovery and data replication are a part of your IT environment then WAN acceleration will make a big impact. Many of these WAN accelerators use compression techniques similar to IIS compression - something else that helps with network latency.
Blue Coat, Riverbed and Cisco are the big players in the WAN acceleration space. They use compression, de-duplication and sophisticated algorithms to improve their appliances. Executives at Riverbed maintain that many customers no longer want to maintain servers at small branch offices.
Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances give remote offices and home workers LAN like speed to their critical applications. Implementation is straight forward with minimal configuration to the existing network. Riverbed and Juniper offer significant technical advantages over Cisco, a fact recognized by Gartner in the last magic quadrant report, and still Cisco find a way to win the hearts and minds of the end users. Riverbed recently announced they would be VMware enabled such that virtual services can run on top of Riverbed’s Steelhead acceleration appliances. For example, a local branch could run a local print server from their acceleration appliance.
Riverbed also recently announced new optimizations for Lotus Notes and encrypted MAPI traffic. Each of these enhancements is a direct result of the ongoing, in-depth relationships Riverbed has with key partners, including VMware and Microsoft.
With WAN acceleration devices in place, application performance monitoring used to be a problem, however, because of the way WAN acceleration hardware boxes respond to requests locally, rather than forwarding them back to the central server, leading to an overall rosy picture. Here is a short list of some areas that WAN acceleration can help with:
- Mobile Workers and Traveling Executives
- Disaster Recovery
- IT Efficiency
Here is some feedback typical of what we see once WAN accelerators are installed: Data recovery times have dropped from 72 hours to less than 24 hours and bandwidth capacity has increased eight-fold. Users no longer experience delays in accessing live data, and the improvement in application acceleration has led to the implementation of new projects.
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