Beyond WAN Optimization

WAN Optimization solutions, from companies such as Riverbed, Juniper, Blue Coat, Cisco and others, free up bandwidth and accelerate applications. WAN Optimization or WAN Acceleration have been adopted by many companies as ways to improve the performance of their wide area networks.

Adaptive Private Networking (APN) from Talari Networks and WAN Optimization each then provide complementary value for customers who are looking to increase bandwidth. On average, WAN Optimization customers experience a 2–4x benefit in terms of bandwidth consumed, while APN actually delivers 30–100x the bandwidth / dollar for all applications. So while for “adding bandwidth,” the approaches might appear to be alternatives, APN and WAN Optimization are quite compatible. In fact, many WAN optimization customers are looking for “what’s next,” and more than half of Talari’s APN customers already have WAN Optimization technology deployed.

The two things that WAN Optimization does best – disk-based compression and fixing the limitations of Microsoft’s CIFS protocol for file transfers – APN does not address directly.

APN, however, allows enterprises to build networks with far greater bandwidth, far lower monthly cost, and greater reliability than a private MPLS or Frame Relay WAN. Beyond this, an APN solution provides application performance benefits beyond WAN optimization.

Whereas WAN Optimization is really good at reducing the time for a transfer the second and successive times that a file is retrieved with little or no change, adding bandwidth using APN means that all data transfers go more quickly. The result is better overall WAN performance.

Further, APN dramatically improves performance in times when the network is having issues with loss and jitter that would otherwise seriously harm application performance. Adaptive Private Networking effectively hides these issues from a complementary WAN Optimization device, enhancing the benefits of both solutions. Where WAN Optimization delivers improved performance on average, APN delivers performance predictability across varying network conditions, a critical value for many businesses.

WAN Optimization’s application-specific approach helps most for Microsoft’s CIFS protocol for file transfers, which was originally designed specifically for the very low latencies found on LANs and thus does not work well in WANs with high latency, and especially not those with moderate to high latency and any meaningful amount of packet loss. APN’s loss mitigation and predictable performance technology in fact helps CIFS performance on its own, and Microsoft has improved CIFS in recent releases of their client and server operating systems (Vista, Windows server), but there is no doubt that WAN Optimization’s application specific approach to CIFS provides significant value, especially when combined with disk-based caching. By enabling even more bandwidth and delivering predictable performance, APN adds value to WAN Opt vendors’ CIFS solutions.

By providing both additional bandwidth and predictable performance, Adaptive Private Networking also helps applications such as VoIP, videoconferencing, Citrix, or the transfer of pre-compressed or encrypted files, for which WAN Optimization techniques can add little or no benefit.

In most cases, the question is not whether you should implement Adaptive Private Networking vs. WAN Optimization. Rather, APN is a fantastic answer to the question “what do I do next for my WAN” for those customers who have already deployed WAN Optimization solutions.

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