Fundamental Approaches to WAN Optimization

Fast and convenient 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 often 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, but also creates significant security risks. This session explores new approaches involving disk-based deduplication,TCP protocol optimization, and application-level protocol chattiness mitigation to address this long-standing productivity vs. cost-efficiency dilemma. We will compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of these new approaches with more traditional methods of addressing this problem.

Learning Objectives

Understand why many applications perform poorly in an environment with high latency and/or limited bandwidth
Examine the pros and cons of compression, caching, and adding WAN bandwidth, and understand why these measures usually fail to address the underlying performance issue
Explore how TCP transport optimization, application-level chattiness mitigation, and disk-based deduplication dramatically improve WAN performance