WAN Optimization Solutions
The radical changes effected in businesses of all types by advancements in Wide Area Network (WAN) and related technologies and solutions have brought in various technology demands from Enterprises and business organizations to mobilize and refine their networks. This new dimension has made technology vendors to focus on specific areas of technology such as WAN Optimization, Virtual Private Networking (VPN), and others to provide corporate organizations with enhanced and secure network connection and infrastructure. WAN Optimization is particularly gaining prominence due to its
With a myriad of WAN Optimization solutions (both hardware and software) flooding the marketplace, businesses are having wide options top choose those solutions that are suitable to their infrastructure and connections. WAN Optimization solutions enable to optimize the wide area networks, increase network throughput to high levels, and accelerate application performance. The main advantage is that they can be used over any type of access technology.
Corporate organizations invariably have numerous branch locations, and business-critical data is shared over the Wide Area Network among these remote locations. The corporate headquarters makes use of network applications to connect to its remote (branch) locations and WAN optimization technology becomes an indispensable aspect. Companies transmit sensitive data such as resources, customer details, payroll, etc. through the Internet or WAN. Network outages can result in loss of valuable data and credibility. Hence, WAN optimization solutions are utilized to prevent problems such as these and to optimize network and application performance. A recent Forrester Research report states that the efficiency of the WAN infrastructure is improved by WAN optimization hardware and software, which use 4 key techniques such as Caching, Protocol Optimization, Compression and Traffic Management.
Wide Area Network Optimizing hardware such as application accelerator and network load balancers help to secure WANs. These WAN optimization solutions are front end hardware and are placed before routers in a network. Application accelerators, network load balancers are WAN devices that function similar to a bandwidth manager or optimizer. WAN optimization hardware is capable of monitoring and optimizing the WAN intelligently; managing and accelerating the flow of data in networks. Besides being able to perform actions on a real-time basis, wide area network optimizing hardware devices can also prioritize data that is being transmitted through the network.
WAN Optimization Hardware and Software products can be easily installed and maintained. Making using of the optimization technology, these products have the capacity to render optimal performance, manageability, and provide end-to-end security. WAN Optimization Hardware devices are quite expensive and require to be installed and fine-tuned in WAN or Local Area Network (LAN) to gain optimal performance. Although the configuration seems to appear simple, there are still aspects such as Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic prioritization end-to-end on WANs, and sometimes reconfiguration of internal LANs that are to be considered. While it is advantageous to use WAN optimization hardware, there are yet certain setbacks as with any new technology. They are not capable of providing complete end-to-end application acceleration, and only average performance is seen in mobile applications. Using WAN optimization hardware devices would mean frequent reconfigurations of WAN and LANs. WAN Optimization software products provide optimization and acceleration to mobile applications. They necessitate extensive testing and configuration in order to perform efficiently. WAN Optimization software solutions are also relatively expensive and require huge amounts of client and server resources. This makes them expensive to be utilized in enterprise-wide deployments.
The major players in the WAN optimization market are developing and offering dynamic solutions, and now the Enterprises have the additional burden of having to choose the right vendor. Enterprises select WAN optimization hardware/software or WAN devices based on major criteria such as Scalability, Performance, and Reliability. Some of the leading vendors that offer WAN optimization solutions are Riverbed Technology, Radware, Juniper, Blue Coat Systems, FatPipe Networks and Expand Networks.
