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ANY WAN WILL DO? Optimised wide area networks (WAN) are altering the very landscape of business communication. CXO invites two industry experts to give their thoughts on the future of WAN technology.
What is driving investment in WAN optimisation technology by organisations today? Nigel Hawthorn. A number of strategic and tactical activities in corporate networks are driving the need for WAN optimisation. Firstly, many organisations are consolidating servers into the centre of their network to reduce costs and ensure better management, such as backups. Secondly, the rollout of ever more sophisticated (often web-based) applications continues. Th irdly, the increase in video streaming for training and meetings to deliver more effective communications. Fourthly, the need to allow users to access internal services whenever and wherever they may be, as users increasingly work remotely from HQ. Fift hly, the general increase in bandwidth needs, to both internal and external content. All five of these trends increase the amount of traffic on the wide area network and the importance that this data gets to the users fast to improve their productivity. It is a mixture of these trends or all of them together that mean CIOs are looking to WAN optimisation to accelerate data delivery and reduce WAN bandwidth usage. Adam Davison. WAN optimisation has evolved from a tactical ‘nice to have’ to a key enabling technology for many strategic IT initiatives such as server consolidation, virtualisation, server based computing and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In fact, an effective WAN optimisation solution is critical to the overall success of these projects, including the ROI or TCO. Add to this the move to centralised, lean IT, distributed enterprise operations and a disparate workforce and you create what we describe as the ‘proximity gap’, whereby applications and
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services become further and further distanced from the user. Then there’s the growth in realtime traffic, web-based applications, on demand services and a growing collaborative culture. Suddenly the WAN has become the umbilical cord between corporate applications, data and services and the business user. How can this technology enable them to reduce their communication and bandwidth costs? NH. WAN optimisation uses a number of techniques to reduce inefficiencies in data transfer, thereby reducing the amount of bandwidth used for each request. Remote caching of data requests mean that a repeated request can be served locally and the data doesn’t have to be sent across the network. Saving repeated strings (called byte caching) reduces further the data requirements when a request is made for similar, but not exactly the same, data. Protocol optimisation can send large amounts of data in parallel – reducing the inefficiencies of protocols originally written for local area networks – reducing the delay multiplier that results from serial requests and responses. Compression of data before sending and decompression at the other end on the fly can ensure that the data that does need to be sent is as small as possible. These four techniques, working together on the data transfers, can reduce traffic needs – thus saving the constant up rating of WAN connections and ensuring that users furthest away from the data and on the weakest WAN links can still have an effective delivery of shared information. AD. Optimising bandwidth usage is the foundation building block of WAN optimisation.
By optimising the traffic flowing over the WAN you are able to send more data, resulting in more efficient use of available bandwidth, which could lead to bandwidth consolidation and reducing a company’s overall bandwidth requirements and costs. Th is becomes key when faced with upgrading bandwidth to cope with increased traffic demands. Optimising the WAN and achieving greater throughput can therefore negate the need for these costly bandwidth upgrades.
Nigel Hawthorn has more than 25 years’ experience of computers, security and networking technologies. He writes articles, has presented at security, e-commerce and networking forums in over 50 countries and contributed to a number of computing books on protocols and security. He has worked for Blue Coat Systems for more than 10 years.
In what ways can improved WAN optimisation boost productivity within organisations, particularly when it comes to better communication with clients, business partners and customers? NH. Often, the major benefit of WAN optimisation is in user response-time improvements. How many times have you been held on the phone while the operator says, “I’m just looking up your record, sorry to keep you waiting, the network’s slow today”? The organisation that can access the customer’s data the fastest will win the most business.
18/08/2010 15:48