WAN Optimization: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

WAN Optimization solutions are designed to do a couple of things: increase the performance of applications running over the WAN by reducing latency and help companies achieve efficiencies in bandwidth usage. This can help avoid costly infrastructure upgrades and reduce the downtime and lost revenue associated with poor network performance.
For most companies, a big value proposition of WAN optimization is data center consolidation. If you can make your WAN performance rival that of your LAN, you can do away with remote data centers and repurpose or liquidate the expensive hardware in each branch office.
It also simplifies making backups in preparation for disaster recovery because much less data needs to travel across the link in order to get a full backup of the branch office to the home office. It becomes feasible to back up key data remotely on a regular basis. (The alternatives are to saturate the link with a scheduled backup, hire on-site staff simply to do the backup, or trust that the end-users will back up their data locally – which isn’t much of a guarantee.) Keeping your data backed up and in one central location also means that it will be easier to verify compliance with government regulation.
There is also a “green effect” as it may also cut down on power requirements too – similar jobs done by separate servers in each branch office can now be handled via a single server at the home office, running virtualized server environments. While that one server requires more CPU cycles, chances are the tradeoff will result in lowered electricity needs. And of course, it eliminates maintenance costs for all that hardware, and the ability to keep your IT staff in your home office rather than sending them on planes to the four corners of the earth when something goes wrong.
There are numerous trends driving the demand for WAN optimization. So, how do you know where you can get the biggest improvements from your investment? Which applications will benefit the most? And, what about the pitfalls? One of the downsides to WAN optimization is that is obscures end-to-end performance monitoring for TCP applications because it breaks the connection between client and server into three separate segments. Most WAN appliances also obscure Netflow data which is used for security and traffic analysis purposes. Traffic prioritization via QoS can also be interrupted. Some WAN optimization solutions address these concerns. Others do not.
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Network Performance Daily will address these questions in a series of upcoming posts on WAN Optimization. Subscribe to our RSS feed to get weekly updates. Also, chime in with your thoughts on what you hope to get from deploying WAN Optimization in your organization. Feel free to leave comments below.