What’s Behind Door #2: WAN Optimization and the Transparency Problem

Julie Bort interviewed George Kurian at Cisco in Network World, where they talk about WAN optimization.
The interview talks about how Cisco’s optimization and acceleration products are distinguished from competitors’ and (of course, considering that George Kurian works for Cisco) promoted as superior because of their transparent placement in the network. This means they can be shared among several servers and applications, as well as integrated with Cisco’s existing products, and QoS and security policies do not have to be migrated or disrupted. One item only barely touched upon is the idea of using a single appliance in the branch office – the Integrated Service Router – to handle WAN optimization, security, and routing – and how having one appliance to handle all these tasks helps cut down on server room clutter and complexity.
To be sure, these appear to be advantages to Cisco’s solution. But the dirty little secret is that all WAN optimization solutions on the market, including Cisco’s, obscure end-to-end performance metrics. This is a major issue, of course, and makes the current state of choosing whether or not to deploy a WAN optimization solution a Monty Hall problem – do you opt to retain visibility into your network performance and the ability to solve problems faster, or you deploy a WAN optimization device and hope that whatever’s behind curtain number two (the resulting performance gain) is better than what you’ve traded for?
Maintaining transparency of response time and latency metrics is critical in our view and any WAN optimization vendor that provides a solution to this problem will have a serious competitive advantage.