Any WAN will do

Optimised Wide Area Networks (WAN) are altering the very landscape of business communication. CXO invites two industry experts to give their thoughts on the future of WAN technology.

What is driving investment in WAN optimisation technology by organisations today?

Nigel Hawthorn. A number of strategic and tactical activities in corporate networks are driving the need for WAN optimisation. Firstly, many organisations are consolidating servers into the centre of their network to reduce costs and ensure better management, such as backups. Secondly, the rollout of ever more sophisticated (often web-based) applications continues. Thirdly, the increase in video streaming for training and meetings to deliver more effective communications. Fourthly, the need to allow users to access internal services whenever and wherever they may be, as users increasingly work remotely from HQ. Fifthly, the general increase in bandwidth needs, to both internal and external content. All five of these trends increase the amount of traffic on the wide area network and the importance that this data gets to the users fast to improve their productivity. It is a mixture of these trends or all of them together that mean CIOs are looking to WAN optimisation to accelerate data delivery and reduce WAN bandwidth usage.

Adam Davison. WAN optimisation has evolved from a tactical 'nice to have' to a key enabling technology for many strategic IT initiatives such as server consolidation, virtualisation, server based computing and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In fact an effective WAN optimisation solution is critical to the overall success of these projects, including the ROI or TCO.

Add to this the move to centralised, lean IT, distributed enterprise operations and a disparate workforce and you create what we describe as the 'Proximity Gap', whereby applications and services become further and further distanced from the user. Then there's the growth in real-time traffic, web based applications, on demand services and a growing collaborative culture. Suddenly the WAN has become the umbilical cord between corporate applications, data and services and the business user.

How can this technology enable them to reduce their communication and bandwidth costs?

NH. Wan optimisation uses a number of techniques to reduce inefficiencies in data transfer, thereby reducing the amount of bandwidth used for each request. Remote caching of data requests mean that a repeated request can be served locally and the data doesn't have to be sent across the network. Saving repeated strings (called byte caching) reduces further the data requirements when a request is made for similar, but not exactly the same, data. Protocol optimisation can send large amounts of data in parallel - reducing the inefficiencies of protocols originally written for local area networks - reducing the delay multiplier that results from serial requests and responses.  Compression of data before sending and decompression at the other end on the fly can ensure that the data that does need to be sent is as small as possible.

These four techniques, working together on the data transfers, can reduce traffic needs - thus saving the constant up rating of WAN connections and ensuring that users furthest away from the data and on the weakest WAN links can still have an effective delivery of shared information.

AD. Optimising bandwidth usage is the foundation building block of WAN optimisation. By optimising the traffic flowing over the WAN you are able to send more data, resulting in more efficient use of available bandwidth, which could lead to bandwidth consolidation and reducing a company's overall bandwidth requirements and costs.

This becomes key when faced with upgrading bandwidth to cope with increased traffic demands. Optimising the WAN and achieving greater throughput can therefore negate the need for these costly bandwidth upgrades.

In what ways can improved WAN optimisation boost productivity within organisations, particularly when it comes to better communicating with clients, business partners and customers?

NH. Often, the major benefit of WAN optimisation is in user response-time improvements. How many times have you been held on the phone while the operator says "I'm just looking up your record, sorry to keep you waiting, the network's slow today"? The organisation that can access the customer's data the fastest will win the most business. 

With WAN optimisation in place, users can work efficiently further away from the data while still providing fast response-times to their customers. Higher-quality (therefore network-demanding) applications can be rolled-out, and it brings a global organisation together.

Without WAN optimisation, remote users tend not to attend global streamed training and senior management meetings - therefore missing out on the latest information. The ultimate goal should be that every user receives instant responses to every question, wherever they are located in the world.

AD. The 'Proximity Gap' created by centralised IT and distributed operations can potentially be counterproductive. Any cost savings achieved through IT consolidation can be eroded by lost user productivity and efficiency. This is where WAN optimisation becomes a critical enabler in assuring the business performance is not adversely affected.

Collaboration with partners and suppliers is key in achieving competitive advantage. The ability for customers to communicate with an organisation via multiple channels, using web based services and applications is paramount. Expand's visibility and control capabilities combined with advanced WAN optimisation techniques allow IT to identify, monitor and accelerate the performance of business critical applications across the WAN, ensuring that the user experience is productive and efficient and that effective communications with customers, partners and other stakeholders is assured.

How does WAN optimisation support the virtual office concept, which allows workers far greater flexibility in terms of where they work?

NH. You could claim that the main beneficiaries of WAN optimisation are those users furthest away from HQ, with the worst WAN links - especially if working over a public Wi-Fi link that isn't even under the control of the IT department.

WAN optimisation vendors have client software for laptops and other platforms that implement some of the WAN optimisation technologies, so that people can work from home and when travelling, and still benefit from better data delivery.

In addition, the virtual appliances available from some WAN optimisation vendors allow a remote office deployment to be of low-cost, if it can run on industry-standard hardware. Often a remote office will have a server that is under-utilised - by deploying a WAN optimisation virtual appliance, the users in that office can benefit from optimisation previously available only to larger offices.

In addition, data routing is often through corporate connections, so any WAN optimisation along the path of the data will benefit the user wherever they may be.

AD. There is a saying that 'work is what you do, not where you go'. WAN optimisation enables disparate employees to create 'virtual office' environments by delivering the corporate applications and services needed - virtually anywhere.  We call this 'Virtual Proximity' - putting the user in virtual proximity of business applications and services.

Supporting a 'virtual office' requires a mix of both physical and virtual solutions. At the central site and remote offices, a physical device may be deployed as there is adequate space and facilities to house the appliance. However, when it comes to the remote user that may be working from home, serviced office or on the road, the ability to deploy a physical device is often not possible. To overcome this, a virtual WAN optimisation offering is needed. Expand's Mobile Accelerator (MACC) addresses this issue and makes the virtual office a reality as opposed to a concept.

In this competitive market what gives your product the edge?

NH. Some WAN optimisation vendors have focused their efforts on delivering optimisation for high-bandwidth backup systems and have difficulty scaling down to small offices and remote users. As I said earlier, it is the users in the smallest offices and when travelling that have the greatest need and I'm pleased that Blue Coat is driving down the costs to the most remote users, with entry-level prices sometimes less than half our competitors, free client software and virtual appliance software that can run on existing standard servers.

Other WAN optimisation vendors only support a small sub-set of data formats and protocols in their solutions - some haven't moved from supporting Microsoft file sharing (CIFS) and email (MAPI).  But today's networks are full of HTTP, HTTPS and various streaming applications. Blue Coat's support for stream caching (for on-demand streams) and splitting (for live streaming), even for Adobe Flash (nowadays the most common streaming technology) and optimisation of SaaS HTTPS content ensures that the fastest growing technologies are also being optimised.

Blue Coat's 12-year history of flexible policies mean that IT management can decide which content is optimised, not just by protocol but by user or content type - as IT management doesn't usually want to spend network resources optimising non-business critical applications.

We are increasingly seeing customers who want to consolidate the number of network devices in their network, so Blue Coat's optional security software (that runs on the same hardware) allows customers to deploy WAN optimisation and web security at the same time.  There's no point in accelerating malware and non-business traffic that might later be thrown away by a security device - so Blue Coat can decide to accelerate the good traffic and block the bad.

AD. Expand has been a pioneer and innovator in WAN optimisation for over a decade and today is recognised as a market leader by many analyst organisations. We continue to innovate and have achieved a number of market firsts, especially in the area of virtualisation, where Expand is unique in its ability to be both deployed as a virtual solution as well as being able to optimise and accelerate virtualised traffic flows. And being a true virtualised offering we enable IT to leverage their existing virtual infrastructure of choice as opposed to having to use the proprietary hardware that is dictated by other vendors.

Our Layer 7 QoS capabilities mean that we can gain visibility and control of over 400 business applications, ensuring prioritisation and assuring all TCP and UDP traffic, including real time applications such as video and VoIP. Our virtual and physical offering means we have the most flexible deployment options of any company in the market.  Furthermore, our breadth of portfolio means that we can span the entire enterprise IT infrastructure, from the data center, to the branch office, to the remote site, to the mobile worker. Add to this the ability for all devices to be centrally managed, monitored and controlled via our management platform ExpandView and we believe we have the most comprehensive, technically advanced and cost effective WAN optimisation solution on the market today.

Biographies

Nigel Hawthorn has more than 25 years' experience of computers, security and networking technologies. He writes articles, has presented at security, e-commerce and networking forums in over 50 countries and contributed to a number of computing books on protocols and security. He has worked for Blue Coat Systems for more than 10 years.

Adam Davison is Corporate VP Sales and Marketing for Expand Networks and is responsible for implementing sales processes across the regions, coordinating and initiating global efforts and alliances to enhance Expand's worldwide presence. Davison has over 16 years' experience in sales, management and business development roles in networking companies and has been successful in building markets and maximizing sales in EMEA for international start-ups.