WAN Optimization Cuts Costs and Improves End-user Productivity

Online, July 27, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Virtually every organization struggles to improve business operations and employee productivity, while keeping associated costs to a minimum. IT personnel responsible for deploying, maintaining and supporting applications delivered over the Internet, are experiencing an increasing requirement to get the highest performance out of network equipment, while simplifying the complexity that causes excess overhead and unnecessary costs.

WAN optimization and application acceleration solutions can significantly reduce costs related to deploying, maintaining and supporting WAN and datacenter infrastructure, while dramatically improving network performance and the ability for remote and mobile employees to get fast access to enterprise applications and information.

Enterprise applications are routinely delivered over the WAN to remote offices and mobile workers. While the number of applications increases every day, the lack of reliability, poor performance and security of these applications going over the WAN increases correspondingly. A primary challenge is the exponential increase of users accessing these applications from remote offices and on the road using mobile devices. These users still require the same level of reliability and performance as the workers experience in the home office.

"Poorly performing and failing network links cause organizations to pay dearly each year", states Tom Yohe, Vice President of Engineering at Stampede Technologies. "Without the proper controls, these issues will continue to cause loss of business, revenue and declining customer satisfaction. The resulting consequences are unacceptable when you consider it costs ten times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current one". However, there is hope. WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs) provide a fast, easy and affordable solution to these challenges.

WAN infrastructure challenges can impede business success
The global economy relies on IP-based networks to deliver 24x7 operations. Unfortunately, for IT personnel within enterprise organizations, and "last mile" Internet service providers, the operational reliability and performance of WAN links are not directly within their operational control. Some of the problems that plague enterprise applications over wide area networks include:

-Many enterprise applications are competing over limited bandwidth
-Applications with chatty protocols add delay in networks
-Network congestion slows productivity for remote employees in remote offices
-Slow network performance hampers mobile workers
-Server resources are overburdened, and unable to keep up with traffic demands

WAN optimization controllers bring network cost savings
WOCs reside at the datacenter, and work together with remote WOCs or SoftWOCs located at remote sites. These products provide two-sided WAN optimization and application acceleration to alleviate the adverse effects of the WAN on application performance, and offloads servers to support more traffic. Remote office acceleration solutions improve the performance of applications that are sent from headquarters to remote offices, and to individuals with computers, laptops and mobile devices in the field.

These devices also work as front-end processors to offload tasks from servers to free up processing power by performing tasks such as SSL termination, TCP multiplexing, caching and data compression. They provide server load balancing and application-level routing capabilities to efficiently manage traffic among multiple servers. WAN optimization and application acceleration techniques improve WAN performance - the ability to both fill the network link, and optimize traffic throughput. Some of the key benefits are:

-By taking over the TCP and application protocol handshaking locally, rather than over the WOC allows the WAN to handle more traffic, while reducing network congestion.
-Compressing content and objects locally, removes non-essential data from going across the WAN. This delivers more bandwidth back to the organization.
-Facilitates site consolidation, by providing optimized WAN connectivity to remote offices and mobile workers; employees gain fast access to enterprise applications.
-By providing a greater utilization of existing bandwidth, WOCs enable organizations to defer, and even eliminate bandwidth upgrades.

WAN optimization and application delivery solutions can significantly lower costs associated with WAN connectivity, and save money by deferring or eliminating bandwidth upgrades. Both enterprises and Internet service providers are under continuous pressure to reduce operational expenses and to improve profitability. Significant areas that can benefit from WAN efficiency gains include site consolidation, and support for remote offices and mobile workers, by ensuring maximum performance and reliability of WAN infrastructure.

Author: Gordon Dorworth is the President and CEO of Stampede Technologies, a leading provider of WAN optimization and application acceleration solutions for satellite and terrestrial-based networks.