WAN or Bandwidth Optimization

The term "WAN or Bandwidth optimization" refers to a collection of capabilities that hone the performance of applications written for high-speed LANs when they are accessed across lower-speed and latency-prone WAN’s.

WAN optimization can boost your network's performance along with enhancing security and improving application delivery.

WAN optimization and application acceleration are growing requirements in today's enterprises, which comprise increasing numbers of branch-office sites and remote users but consolidate application and data storage resources for regulatory compliance reasons and cost savings. By some estimates, 70 to 90 percent of enterprise resources are now accessed by remote users across a WAN, which is slower than the LAN platform for which most applications were designed and introduces distance-based latency into the networking experience.

WAN optimization functions, however, are now available to alleviate WAN traffic loads, reduce application protocol message round trips, and cache critical data to make branch-office application-access experiences "LAN-like".

CISCO WAAS

Cisco Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS) provide a rich set of WAN optimization capabilities. Among the WAAS functions are advanced data redundancy elimination (DRE), caching, application-specific protocol acceleration, and TCP flow optimization (TFO), all of which accelerate application response times by alleviating WAN traffic loads and congestion. You can implement these features using a physically integrated module in the router or an appliance colocated and logically integrated with the router. Content distribution and caching also help improve client performance by keeping the transmission of validated data within the branch office so that user response times feel "local".

In addition, Layer 7 application-specific protocol proxies enable local processing of client-server protocol messages by the WAAS module, alleviating what would otherwise entail thousands of messaging round trips when executing such applications as the Microsoft Common Internet File System (CIFS) over the WAN, which introduces latency into the process and lowers performance.

In addition to improving performance, lightening WAN traffic loads and reducing the number of round-trip protocol messages might enable you to postpone investments in additional WAN bandwidth by freeing capacity for new business-critical application traffic, such as voice over IP (VoIP). Cisco WAAS reduces congestion on the WAN, and the router identifies VoIP traffic and prioritizes it as business critical even while compressing and forwarding other bulk traffic types.

Cisco Integrated Services Routers that support Cisco WAAS and the other branch-office networking technologies described can be easily preconfigured and shipped to each branch office. This approach reduces IT staff travel and installation costs for the enterprise.

• An integrated WAN optimization and routing solution reduces the need to train staff already familiar with the router management interface: you can configure and manage the WAAS module on the integrated services module from the Cisco IOS Software command-line interface (CLI), while advanced multi-site monitoring and management via the Cisco WAAS graphical management interface is also preserved.

• Integration provides service transparency, meaning that Cisco WAAS capabilities deploy without the use of tunnels. Tunnels modify the sender's and receiver's source and destination IP addresses and TCP port numbers to identify the WAN optimization endpoints. Transparency, then, is an important Cisco differentiator, because you can preserve existing policies for QoS and security without re-architecting your enterprise network. Transparency also helps your organization maintain visibility of individual traffic flows and measure the net benefit of WAN optimization on individual applications.

• With an integrated device, you have fewer devices to manage and fewer user interfaces to deal with. Troubleshooting faults and errors is easier with integrated technology as compared to overlay appliances.

• There is one service warranty on the whole Integrated Services Router platform. Software upgrades are included for all modules under that contract, making them easier to manage and less expensive to procure

EXPAND

Expand’s technology is a standards’-based, tightly integrated, multi-service platform that delivers the complete Application Acceleration solution. The platform is both open and scalable, allowing future technologies to easily integrate with all of the other Expand services currently available. This complete and flexible approach is the only way to guarantee simplicity and cost reduction as IT adapts to meet today’s global business requirements.

Expand Networks is a pioneer and innovator of WAN Optimization technologies. It’s solutions enable accelerated delivery and guaranteed performance of business critical applications and services within virtualized WAN environments and across distributed enterprise infrastructures.

Expand's Foundation Wan Optimization enables the building blocks to deliver and control centralized Branch Office IT infrastructures over the WAN. Ensuring your Branch Office users gain a Virtual Proximity Experience.

In low bandwidth, high latency environments, Expand’s WAN Optimization solution can accelerate any application across any network to deliver a guaranteed and constant experience for the remote user.

By creating a ‘Virtual Proximity’ environment its solutions deliver a superior end user experience, closing the user/application ‘virtualization gap’ and putting the user in ‘virtual proximity’ of applications and datacentere services.

Expand Bandwidth calculator

Citrix Branch Repeater and WAN Scaler

Branch office application acceleration and WAN optimization
Citrix Branch Repeater™ is a WAN optimization solution that accelerates application delivery to branch office users while dramatically reducing WAN bandwidth requirements and simplifying branch IT infrastructure. Branch Repeater dramatically increases productivity by providing a high definition user experience over any network. Branch Repeater also reduces costs by improving utilization of existing WAN bandwidth and by streamlining branch IT start-up and management.

The Branch Repeater product family addresses the full range of WAN optimization scenarios and delivers unparalleled application acceleration benefits—especially for Citrix XenApp™.

Citrix WAN Scaler

Many WAN optimization solutions are able to improve WAN communications by removing the TCP Slow Start process and by increasing the TCP Window Size to allow more data to pass over the WAN before an acknowledgement is required.

However, most WAN links contain additional protocols in addition to ICA. Citrix WAN Scaler can have a positive impact on the responsiveness of ICA by using its adaptive TCP flow control functionality to improve overall WAN link utilization. WAN Scaler’s implementation of TCP Congestion Control is setup in such a way that if a collision occurs on the wire, the send rate is only slightly impacted or not at all, thus allowing the protocols to continue to use the full bandwidth of the link.

WANScaler also modifies the TCP Window Size for the WAN link, based on the Window Scaling process. This modification means more data passes before pauses, thus allowing for faster data traversal. Both of these enhancements to WAN link utilization can improve ICA responsiveness as the purchased bandwidth will be more fully utilized.

For further information please contact KSS Technologies