Comparisons of Different WAN Acceleration Technologies

Access to data hosted in central data centers has been a continuous challenge for application users in remote branch offices. WAN-related performance problems associated with bandwidth and latency usually pressure IT managers to deploy file and application servers in the branch offices themselves, in order to maintain application performance and end-user productivity. But maintaining and backing-up remote server and storage assets outside of the data center is not only expensive, it also creates significant security risks. This session explores new approaches involving disk-based deduplication, TCP protocol optimization, and application-level chattiness mitigation to address this long-standing productivity vs. cost-efficiency issue. We will compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of these new approaches with more traditional methods of addressing this problem.

Understand why many applications perform poorly over the WAN in an environment with high atency and/or limited bandwidth.
Examine the pros and cons of compression, caching, adding WAN bandwidth, and understand why none of these measures adequately solves the essential problem.
Explore how TCP protocol optimization, application-level chattiness mitigation, and new disk-based deduplication approaches can dramatically improve performance over the WAN and enable greater centralization of storage resources.