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The need to improve application response times is just one of the factors driving the WAN optimization market, which grew out of the old wide-area file services (WAFS) sector. Interest is currently being stoked by the following IT trends, each of which is inexorably linked to both network and storage systems.
- Storing remote-office data in the main data center
- Increased use of collaborative applications
- Business continuity: Failing over from one data center to another means moving multigigabyte chunks of data across a WAN
Robert Whiteley, principal analyst and research director for the IT infrastructure and operations team at Cambridge, MA-based Forrester Research Inc., says many companies are seeing a direct impact on their storage systems as they become more geographically dispersed and dependent on high-performance WANs.
"The standard approach [to accommodating increased WAN use] is to overprovision the amount of bandwidth you need," he says. But purchasing more bandwidth can be very expensive. According to Whiteley, a company with an international E3 line going into Bangalore, India, for example, might pay up to $40,000 each month for a private link. But WAN optimization products, for a fraction of that cost, reduce bandwidth costs by reserving bandwidth for priority traffic and using data-reduction technologies.
"The bad news is that [WAN optimization] is still a nascent technology, so it comes with limitations," says Whiteley. These products require plenty of initial testing and careful deployment to avoid problems with reliability and scalability, he adds. "You ca...
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n't just pick the vendor you have the best relationship with or the one with the best price." (See "What to test," below.)
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Before getting sidetracked by throughput, beware of some of the potential pitfalls of buying a WAN optimization product that you haven't tested thoroughly.
Scalability: As your WAN traffic grows, how scalable is the optimization appliance? How costly and difficult is it to scale? How many protocols does the appliance handle?
Security: How does the vendor secure its appliance? Does your WAN optimizer need to accelerate Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-encrypted traffic?
Backing up the box: Do you need a redundant device in your main data center? What happens if a box fails?
Visibility: What level of performance is the WAN optimization box delivering during different times of day, for different applications and to how many users? In other words, how is the remote-office user experience?
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