Optimizing WAN Bandwidth To Support Server-Less Branch Offices
As enterprises expand their distributed workforces, supporting server-less branch offices and mobile workers becomes an ever-increasing challenge. IT organizations continue to look for technologies to help them maintain efficiencies, while improving user satisfaction and productivity.
- (1888PressRelease) September 02, 2010 - As branch offices and mobile workers play an increasing role in business growth, IT organizations must find ways to keep up with end-user demands for corporate information and applications. Consolidation of IT infrastructure within branch offices can help organizations gain efficiencies, lower overhead and simplify infrastructure complexity.
While datacenter consolidation can certainly help achieve the financial goals of cost-cutting, the consolidation of servers and network equipment can have a significant adverse affect on the performance of enterprise applications over the WAN, as greater demands are placed on current WAN and datacenter resources. Web applications, which are not typically bandwidth efficient, impose greater demands on the WAN, and can easily bring it to a crawl, diminishing the productivity of employees and inhibiting ecommerce. Adding more bandwidth to solve this problem will not fix it. Rather, it will just increase the monthly costs, and still leave you needing a solution. One of the primary problems that applications have when going over WAN links is due to the distance between the datacenter and remote users located in branch offices, and mobile users that can be accessing datacenter servers from anywhere. This distance causes latency, which causes poor network performance, and unfortunately, latency can't be solved by adding more bandwidth.
"While the initial cost savings may be dramatic, creating a server-less branch office can be a big headache for remote employees, due to poor WAN performance from latency and congestion", states Tom Yohe, Vice President of Engineering at Stampede Technologies. "Indeed, server-less branch offices or service-driven datacenter initiatives can impede application performance and prevent organizations from providing the level of IT service and support that end-users have come to expect".
As IT organizations look for ways to avoid poor WAN performance, and quickly deliver applications, it is critical to ensure that the datacenter is highly responsive to changing business requirements - while lowering costs and improving service quality levels. The proliferation of decentralized organizations is causing enterprises to view WAN optimization solutions as a critical element within server-less branches and mobile environments.
Taking full advantage of your existing WANs
Organizations may notice that their data going over the WAN is not effectively utilizing the available bandwidth. There are many reasons for this, and users can experience considerable performance degradation. Latency, TCP sessions, HTTP(S) connections, unnecessary and redundant data sent over the WAN all add to network latency and congestion, and to compound this, server resources are overburdened by handling many of the compute-intensive tasks associated with these issues.
WAN optimization technologies speed WAN traffic from the datacenter to end-user devices utilizing a combination of TCP and application-level acceleration techniques, compression, de-duplication, caching and quality-of-service techniques to increase application performance. WAN optimization squeezes more traffic into network links to provide the most effective use of available bandwidth, to overcome network congestion and latency. This allows organizations that are consolidating IT resources to support a greater number of users and deliver more applications, without adding WAN bandwidth and server resources.
WAN optimization enables mobile workers and server-less branch offices with fast, reliable access to enterprise applications
Another WAN acceleration option is client acceleration software that supports remote server-less branch office employees and mobile workers, giving them LAN-like access to information and applications. These solutions typically have a WOC appliance at the datacenter with remote client software deployed on end-user computers, laptops and mobile devices. Client acceleration software delivers LAN-like application performance to any user, whether working from home, from a remote branch office, or on the road.
The proliferation of decentralized organizations is causing enterprises to view WAN optimization and application acceleration solutions as a critical element within distributed and mobile environments. Through the deployment of these solutions, companies are able to cost-effectively provide fast and reliable access to enterprise applications and information to employees located anywhere in the world.
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.
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