Optimise your existing Network reducing the need for costly upgrades.

WAN Optimization, often referred to as Application Acceleration is a process by which you can enable your centrally hosted applications to perform significantly better when accessed by remote branch offices over leased lines, MPLS networks, Frame Relay and other WAN type connections.

This solution has been tried, tested and deployed by businesses that have experienced application performance issues with resources and applications that are centrally hosted, requiring remote users simultaneous access from multiple sites in numerous locations. Some sites may even be thousands of kilometers apart.

The traditional solution applied to this scenario would have been to throw costly WAN bandwidth upgrades at it. Although bandwidth may in some cases help, it does not always work. Most issues are actually caused by the latency (the various delays a packet may encounter on route) and bandwidth alone will not always improve latency.

Take for example two sites, one in London and the other in Sydney Australia. In 'perfect lab style conditions' the two sites connected by an MPLS network can ping each other with a 7ms response. The problem is that 'perfect condition's do not exist and a response time of 7ms will often vary dramatically as the packets travel through various service providers, some packets taking one route and some packets taking other routes. In addition, certain applications coupled with the inefficiencies of LAN designed TCP sessions will perform badly under conditions of varying delay causing the applications to freeze, crash, become unresponsive aswell as becoming extremely slow. For teams working remotely this creates an unworkable environment, frustrates employees and even damages business.

Upgrading a 4 Mbps line to a 30 Mbps or even a 100 Mbps between the sites will be an expensive upgrade with no guarantee that this will aid in application performance.

This is where WAN Optimization comes in as a cost effective solution, accelerating critical applications in most cases without the need for any link speed upgrades.

Take the two example sites mentioned above. The London Head Office site where the servers are based now installs an WAN Acceleration appliance on site, so does the Australian Sydney office where the remote users and workstations are based. The two WAN Optimization appliances will now manage the sessions (communication) between the two globally disparate sites. This is opposed to the old way which was for the client and the server to manage the connections directly between the two sites. The two appliances will now manage the new connections and are now able to use an array of sophisticated techniques to keep the connections as stable and as fast as can be possible between the servers and the workstations. Depending on the application in question (SAP, SMB, Citrix ICA etc), the appliances can 'compress' the data before traversing the WAN links meaning that there is actually a lot less data needs to be exchanged between sites. As well as QOS, de-duplication and traffic shaping, TCP is now no longer used to manage the sessions, meaning inefficiencies are removed and chatty protocols like CIFS and Microsoft SMB will now not be able flood the links as they did before. The server will now talk to the wan optimization appliance, the appliance will set up a new more efficient separate connection in order to talk to the other WAN Optimization appliance stripping out the chatter and other past inefficiencies between the two sites. Finally the second unit will convert the session back to the original format so that the receiving work station will be able to understand and process the data.

Forward Networks can deploy this solution for your sites that are suffering from WAN related performance problems. We will work with your team to find the best fit vendor for your company, supplying vendors such as Riverbed Steelhead, Blue Coat Proxy, Cisco WAAS and Expand solutions. This solution has been tried, tested and deployed by major organisations that would have otherwise payed out for highly expensive bandwidth upgrades.

This solution brings a ROI (return on investment) within a short space of time. Some businesses will even find that they are actually able to downgrade bandwidth with newly deployed wan acceleration solutions.

Below are links to some further reading case studies of companies that have already deployed WAN Optimization appliances to solve the all too common wan performance issues that come with centrally hosted resources.

Call us today for more information.