Excerpt:
Jeff Aaron, Director, Product Marketing at Silver Peak looks at an increasingly important enabler of strategic IT initiatives, including branch office server and storage centralization, Wide Area Network file sharing and business continuity planning.
Recent advances in technology have enabled WAN acceleration to transition from a tactical fix to a strategic IT investment, yet these advances have also led to increased confusion in the marketplace.
- Data Reduction: The most efficient way to accelerate the transfer of information across the WAN, is to not send it in the first place. This is the major principle employed by data reduction, a new WAN acceleration technology that provides significant benefits in the form of increased WAN bandwidth efficiency and reduced application response time.
- Compression: There are various types of compression used, and the term itself refers to a technique employed to reduce the bandwidth consumed by traffic traversing the WAN by compressing the files traveling across it.
- Latency mitigation: The time for information to go from a sender to receiver and back is called the latency of the network. Latency often has a big impact on the performance of applications across the WAN. Once the amount of unacknowledged data reaches the congestion window size, the transmission of new data is postponed until order data is acknowledged
- TCP Acceleration: The TCP protocol was designed to operate reliably over almost any transmission medium regardless of transmission rate, delay, corruption, duplication, or reordering of segments
- CIFS Acceleration: Common internet file system (CIFS) is a protocol developed by Microsoft for remote file access that allows most applications to open and share files across the Internet or other IP based networks
- Application-specific Acceleration: Some vendors perform application-specific latency optimization techniques to improve the performance of specific types of traffic across the WAN
- Quality of Service (QoS) in effort to maximize WAN utilization, most enterprises will oversubscribe their WAN links
There are many technologies available to address the various issues associate with application delivery across a wide area network. The best solution will implement a variety of techniques, both old and new, to improve bandwidth efficiency while reducing perceived application response time.
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