116
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
Removing inefficiency in your wide area network Mark Lewis outlines why WAN optimisation can be important to the success of your business. What is WAN optimisation? Mark Lewis. WAN optimisation helps companies overcome the issues of poor performance when accessing data and fi les over the wide area network (WAN). In a nutshell, Riverbed technology makes the WAN perform like a local area network (LAN). In our experience, organisations with distributed IT network architectures oft en encounter performance issues over the WAN due to latency – or the amount of time it takes traffic to move across the WAN – and application protocol inefficiencies, which is also known as chattiness. These two factors can cause bottlenecks on the WAN that can cripple traffic moving between sites, killing productivity along the way. Because of this, no matter how much bandwidth is purchased, until the issues involving latency and application inefficiencies have been addressed, performance will not be materially improved. Riverbed solutions address each of these issues by optimising application protocols to mitigate the effects of chattiness and accelerating traffic across the WAN, which reduces the impact of latency. Riverbed also uses caching and deduplication technologies to reduce the amount of traffic across the WAN, giving organisations the ability to better use the bandwidth they already have. As a result, Riverbed customers see significant performance improvement in application speeds over the WAN. Why is WAN optimisation important and who benefits from a WAN optimisation solution? ML. Any distributed organisation can benefit from a Riverbed WAN optimisation solution. Because we overcome the issues of latency and poor application performance over the WAN, we’ve enabled companies to take advantage of their existing network infrastructure and applications in ways that they had never imagined possible. Riverbed solutions have enabled companies to reduce their bandwidth utilisation by between 65 percent to 95 percent, allowing them to avoid costly bandwidth upgrades. Riverbed’s application-specific optimisations also improve application performance across the network, resulting in performance improvements of five to 50 times, and in some cases up to 100 times. With these dramatic results, our customers have been able to reduce costs, consolidate their IT infrastructures, deploy private cloud environments and accelerate disaster recovery (DR) traffic. That’s why many of our customers consider WAN optimisation to be a critical component of their IT infrastructure.
RIVERBED EX INT P116.indd 116
We’ve enabled companies to take advantage of their existing network infrastructure and applications in ways that they had never imagined possible”
Mark Lewis is Senior Director of Marketing & Alliances for EMEA at Riverbed Technology. He is responsible for business development, developing the brand and raising awareness of WAN optimisation across the region. Mark has over 20 years’ industry experience in a variety of roles covering engineering, sales and marketing.
What are some of the challenges you think this technology can help organisations overcome? ML. Our customers have turned to Riverbed to overcome a range of issues from poor application performance in distributed environments to challenges with slow remote data backup and replication. The Riverbed range of solutions have enabled companies to overcome insufficient, expensive or congested network bandwidth into remote offices, implement consolidation and private cloud environments and enable a mobile workforce to access applications from the data centre at LAN-like speeds. Riverbed also offers customers the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualised partition on our Steelhead appliances that enables customers to deploy up to five edge services such as print, DHCP, fi rewall and video. Th is gives customers the ability to consolidate WAN optimisation and edge services onto a single appliance. Additionally, Riverbed’s Cascade products provide network and application monitoring and management, which enables companies to have true visibility and insight into how their networks are running. What impact does virtualisation and cloud computing have for WAN optimisation solutions? ML. The more pertinent question is how WAN optimisation benefits virtualisation and cloud computing projects. When organisations start to move local services to a centralised location, whether it be virtualised or a private or public cloud environment, users are no longer accessing applications over a LAN. As a result, they’re now relying on the WAN, which brings us back to the challenge of poor application performance. A WAN optimisation solution will help organisations looking to deploy both private and public clouds, to overcome the performance hurdles of latency and poor application performance and allow organisations and employees to take full advantage of the benefits that virtualisation and cloud computing environments bring.
18/08/2010 15:47