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Home > Networking News > Law firm chooses Silver Peak WAN optimization for its Layer 3 approach |
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For Luis Wiedemann, network manager for the law firm Broad and Cassel, Layer 3 (the network layer) was the best approach. This feature was a major factor in his decision to select Silver Peak Systems Inc. to optimize his company's new MPLS wide area network. Silver Peak and some other leading vendors, such as Cisco and F5 Networks, provide "application-agnostic" WAN optimization by focusing on the network layer. Other vendors, such as Riverbed Technology, concentrate on Layer 7, the application layer. Vendors that work in Layer 7 focus on accelerating key applications and must align themselves tightly with those applications' developers to make sure they are up to date with the latest changes in the applications' protocols. "[Silver Peak works] in Layer 3," Wiedemann said. "As soon as they told me that, I was sold because most other products don't do that." Wiedemann said he was wary of investing tens of thousands of dollars on a vendor, only to find that when Microsoft comes out with another version of Exchange, he'd have to wait for that vendor to upgrade its product.
"I don't like to make things proprietary where you run the risk of them not working later," he said. "It's too much of a gamble. These companies aren't that aligned with software vendors and developers. Microsoft doesn't like to play that well with other companies either. Looking at all the pieces of the puzzle, yeah, you can do incredible things when you make things very application specific. But when you're a shop like us with a large number of applications, where you don't do just one thing like ERP that we can specifically target, it's kind of wasteful to come up with application-specific solutions. When you take that [Layer 3] approach, you get a much more well-rounded product and much more value for what you're getting." Vendors such as Riverbed have recognized that some customers might be concerned about how tightly aligned they are with the developers of the applications they optimize. And they make every effort to alleviate those concerns by forming partnerships with vendors. For instance, in July, Riverbed announced it had been accepted into the Microsoft Protocol Optimization Program, which formally gives Riverbed access to Microsoft's intellectual property and technology. Leading toward Layer 3 Nick Lippis, president of research firm Lippis Enterprises Inc., said Layer 3 acceleration is a general trend among many vendors, while companies such as Riverbed have done a good job of choosing key applications such as Exchange to accelerate at Layer 7. However, Lippis said, companies that have a broad range of applications that require acceleration can benefit from the Layer 3 approach. "I agree with that general school of thought, to have that separated into Layer 3 to optimize different kinds of applications," he said. Wiedemann preferred the Layer 3 approach mainly because of the broad range of applications that run over the wide area network of his 500-person law firm. His firm produces heavy Citrix, Exchange and SQL traffic over the WAN, but there are scores of other applications as well. "We're starting to identify that the economy has driven a lot of law firms to start doing … more data management for clients. We are starting to organize their files a lot more frequently than we used to," Wiedemann said. "So I'm starting to see a lot more demands on storage space and file transfers and access for clients. How do we manage that? It's starting to wear on us. I'm starting to see a need for something a little more robust to handle a lot of duplicate traffic that goes back and forth all the time." This growing demand on the firm's WAN motivated Wiedemann to upgrade from a hub-and-spoke network to a MPLS network this year. Currently each of the firm's eight branch offices connect directly to its Orlando headquarters. The firm is in an implementation process with its MPLS network, where each branch will have 3 megabits going into the cloud and the Orlando headquarters will have 45 megabits going into the cloud. The firm is also adding a new collocation facility in Miami where it will consolidate all of its applications. That facility will also have a 45 megabit connection into the cloud. Wiedemann said he is currently testing Silver Peak on the 45 megabit connections. "We went into WAN optimization as part of this consolidation and upgrade," Wiedemann said. "I looked at Silver Peak not to alleviate the existing issues we have with the WAN but to augment the network moving forward." Despite the upgrade to MPLS and the addition of Silver Peak, he said he will remain very vigilant about what is allowed on his network. He worries that some business units will assume that the new WAN has infinite capacity and start throwing countless applications onto the network. Wiedemann said he is trying to set up a formal process to make sure all new applications are completely visible to his networking team. "You start seeing things like an 80% reduction in HTTP traffic and a 40% reduction in data replication and start thinking, wow, this is pretty invincible. I can put anything I want on it. All of a sudden we're demanding a two–megabit, high-definition video conferencing system that was never in consideration through IT necessarily. We have a set amount of space [in the WAN]. Silver Peak doesn't make the space big, it just sort of cleans it out." Let us know what you think about the story; email: Shamus McGillicuddy, News Editor
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