Several WAN appliances include compression and TCP acceleration along with file-caching and application-specific acceleration.
But not all vendors agree that such consolidation is wise. “I think more customers are more worried about just the visibility
into the network,” says Allot’s Narayanan. “They want a good traffic-management company with the ability to decode any application
layer properly, not falsify it.”
Other vendors, such as Swan Labs, Riverbed, Disksites, and Juniper Networks, are banking on single-box solutions. Tom Tansy,
vice president of Marketing at Swan Labs, sees a further consolidation of technology. He believes many customers are suffering
from a “box proliferation problem” and will want to roll out a single appliance instead of many disparate solutions.
Either way, when it comes to speeding up WANs, everyone agrees that more bandwidth alone is not the answer. As long as TCP
remains unchanged (and for now it has to) and the speed of light governs latency, boosting WAN performance will require tricks
at the protocol level, combined with traffic-flow prioritization and application-specific packet reduction. WAN acceleration
solutions will continue to evolve to include multiple techniques for getting most out of your link, at least until we find
a way to send data faster than the speed of light.
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
