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Augmenting WAN Optimization
WAN Optimization solutions, from companies such as Riverbed, Juniper, Blue Coat, Cisco and others, free up bandwidth and accelerate applications. WAN Optimization has been adopted by many companies as a key way to improve application performance over their wide area networks.
WAN Virtualization 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. By enabling the use of Inexpensive Internet bandwidth without sacrificing business quality WAN Virtualization delivers 30–100x the bandwidth / dollar for all applications. So while for “adding bandwidth,” the approaches might appear to be alternatives, WAN Virtualization 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 WAN Virtualization customers already have WAN Optimization technology deployed in their networks.
The two things which WAN Optimization does best – disk-based data de-duplication (data streamlining) and fixing the limitations of Microsoft’s CIFS protocol for file transfers – WAN Virtualization does not address directly.
WAN Virtualization, 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 WAN Virtualization provides application acceleration benefits on top of what WAN optimization delivers.
Whereas WAN Optimization is fantastic at reducing transfer times the second and successive times that a file with little or no change is accessed, adding bandwidth using WAN Virtualization means that all data transfers, including first time transfers and encrypted application data, go more quickly.
Further, WAN Virtualization dramatically improves performance at those times when the network is having issues with loss and jitter that would otherwise seriously harm application performance. WAN Virtualization effectively hides these issues from the WAN Optimization devices, enhancing the benefits of both solutions. Where WAN Optimization delivers improved performance on average, WAN Virtualization 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. While WAN Virtualization’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 (Windows 7, Windows Server 2008), but there is no doubt that WAN Optimization’s application specific approach to CIFS provides significant value, especially when combined with disk-based data de-duplication. By enabling even more bandwidth and delivering predictable performance, WAN Virtualization adds value to WAN Optimization vendors’ CIFS solutions.
By providing both additional bandwidth and application performance predictability, WAN Virtualization also helps applications such as VoIP, videoconferencing and Citrix/VDI, as well as the transfer of pre-compressed or encrypted files, for which WAN Optimization techniques can add little or no benefit. WAN Virtualization appliances choose network paths with the least packet loss and lowest jitter for such high-priority real-time or interactive traffic, and switches with sub-second response to a better path in the face of high loss or jitter.
In most cases, the question is not whether you should implement WAN Virtualization or WAN Optimization. Rather, WAN Virtualization 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.
© 2012 Talari Networks. All rights reserved.
