Have you ever noticed that there just never seems to be enough WAN bandwidth? It's a problem that's been with us for awhile.
Back in the '90s, dedicated point products emerged to help address this nagging issue, using a combination of compression and Quality of Service (QoS) to get more out of limited WAN links.
Those technologies are still important today, allowing IT administrators to guarantee bandwidth for critical applications while controlling the effects of other traffic. With WAN optimization, enterprises can get more out of their congested WAN links, saving money by delaying the purchase of additional bandwidth.
However, WAN optimization point products only provide short term gains when used in isolation. Furthermore, they don't address latency issues across the WAN, which have a significant impact on application performance – particularly when dealing with real-time applications like voice over IP (VoIP) and transactional applications like Citrix.
In addition, even when WAN bandwidth is doubled, it's still significantly smaller than the throughput provided on a LAN. As a result, link optimiz
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ation is often not enough to ensure LAN-like performance when delivering applications across a WAN.
While compression and QoS are vital, they must be included with other application acceleration techniques to provide a comprehensive solution for application delivery. Newer application delivery solutions, for example, will combine all of the following bandwidth management and application acceleration techniques:
It is important to look for an acceleration solution that addresses the full gambit of application delivery needs. In addition to optimizing WAN bandwidth and ensuring proper handling of business critical applications, it must dramatically reduce perceived application response time, while enabling centralized control of branch office infrastructure. This is the only way to transition from a tactical to a strategic approach to application delivery, going beyond the short term gains that come with bandwidth band-aids.
Dr. Hughes founded Silver Peak Systems in 2004 and previously held senior architect positions with Cisco Systems, Stratacom, Blueleaf and Nortel. Dr. Hughes has a PhD in packet network optimization.
