Excerpt:
Choosing the best WAN optimization solution for branch office consolidation and acceleration can be challenging due to the wide range of WAN applications and solutions that are currently available from more than a dozen vendors. Ashton, Metzler & Associates (AM&A) has developed a set of evaluation criteria that can assist IT organizations in the selection of WAN optimization solutions:
- Performance
- Transparency
- Solution Architecture
- OSI Layer
- Capability to Perform Application Monitoring
- Scalability
- Cost Effectiveness
- Application Sub-classification
- Module vs. Application Optimization
- Disk vs. RAM-based Compression
- Protocol Support
- Security
- Ease of Deployment and Management
- Change Management
- Support for Meshed Traffic
- Support for Real Time Traffic
The criteria listed were applied to the Cisco WAN optimization solution, while no attempt was made to assign a grade to the solution, Cisco's WAAS has a number of strengths, including:
- Transparency: for many IT organizations the first rule of networking is that you should not do anything that causes the network to break. It should be possible to implement a WAN optimization solution and still be able to use existing management and monitoring tools
- Ease of Deployment and Management: Cisco's WAAS is less likely to break some aspect of IT than other solutions, as a result, WAAS is easier to deploy and manage than solutions that break something.
- Integration: Cisco's position in the enterprise networking marketplace, the chances are that the environment in which the WAN optimization solutions will be deployed will be a Cisco environment, ensuring that it WAN optimization solution does not impact this environment
- Performance: Under favorable conditions the WAAS V4.0 can provide impressive degrees of acceleration, superior speed compression, and does not degrade under load
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