Adam Davison, VP sales EMEA, Expand Networks takes a look at WAN optimisation techniques

The application has now become the star of the show from SharePoint to SAP, Oracle to Citrix. Whatever the project, wherever employees happen to be located, it’s the application that counts. Unfortunately, many applications weren’t designed with the WAN in mind and add tremendous overhead to the existing network, resulting in poor performance and compromised productivity.

With the spotlight falling on the application, we asked one old timer to complete a diary and tell us exactly what it gets up to in a typical day and the tough challenges it faces.

0:01 – Get booted for the suited.

0:02 – Arrive at the office. Get a few things done.

0:05 – Synch up briefly with the other applications. Apparently the CRM system is getting upgraded later today. Of course in the old days I’d have this place to myself; head of the household and lord of all I surveyed, but now I have to share it with all these others. Virtualisation? It’s coming but give me back my own dedicated processors and I’ll show you what things used to be like around here. Slower, yes. Less effective? Definitely. But we all knew where we were and what the pecking order was. If we didn’t manage to get finished at the end of the day, well, that’s what weekends are for.

Apparently, the boss says we need to be efficient these days.

11:30 – Leave the office on my way to a branch office in Adelaide, am travelling economy class with everyone else.

11:34 – Stuck in traffic just outside the datacentre.

11:52 – Arrive Adelaide, 21 minutes late. Try to do some paperwork but can’t.

11:58 – The rest of me arrives in Adelaide. Successfully do the paperwork.

12:25 – Get home.

12:26 – Need to go to urgent meeting in Lagos, book priority ticket.

12:32 – Arrive Lagos. Do loads of paperwork. Get vaccinations. I am not used to working with this sort of equipment. Would have got here earlier, but Skype got upgraded on the way over and took up most of the room for the journey. Had a spell in maintenance a couple of weeks ago. After that they ran a few tests and said I was fit for work, but I’m not so sure. Something’s missing and I just feel as if I have been patched up. Another new database to work with this week. How many is that now? There has been some talk of a makeover next year. I’m going to get ‘SOA’ apparently. It’s all about speed these days. I have never been busier. The only chance I get for sometime to myself is when those directory servers are syncing up – and that seems to take less time every day.

21:00 – Have a rest for essential maintenance.

21:30 – Complete the day’s work sheet.

21:35 – Drop work sheet off at the library.

This story from a typical application demonstrates that traversing the WAN is a complicated operation with latency and congestion obstacles. What we can conclude, therefore, is that the move towards centralised and consolidated IT operations in the name of business agility must be seen in the light of its impact on remote users and the network.

WAN optimisation techniques can mitigate the vagaries of the WAN and improve application response times. This market pioneered nearly ten years ago is still experiencing a high degree of innovation from vendors and different combination of features. With this is mind, Gartner, who recently produced its Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimisation Controllers, has advised organisations to ask themselves a number of questions before committing to a particular technology.

It is recommended that enterprises understand the applications and services running on their network and protocols used, before deploying a given technology. The analyst firm also views that as the market develops, it will see integration of some features into other hardware such as routers and therefore customers should make decisions of deployment based on rapid ROI.

Another key consideration in the decision making process should be whether the WAN Optimisation technology integrates with the infrastructure and provides complete transparency avoiding any additional burden on the customer and jeopardising the success of IT operations.

In an ideal world then, enterprises would require WAN Optimisation technology that has been designed with a thorough understanding of the market and is able to accelerate all IP applications. Offering a broad feature set and a healthy mix of QOS, reporting and acceleration features, it would also be seamlessly and transparently implemented. Since the market is rapidly developing, then quick ROI of less than two years would be a premium.

The best technology options will also have the facility to evolve because tomorrow’s customers will demand continued innovation and vision from vendors such as the integration of WAN Optimisation into routers and switches, virtualisation and managed services offerings to optimise networks on a platform of their choice. The life for applications is going to become a lot faster.