TeleKazam!

WAN Optimization solutions – assuming that they work for the applications you need them to work for – are like magic. Consolidating data centers, from a relativistic standpoint, actually moves users further away, so to consolidate data centers, and lowering costs, WAN performance needs to be good enough for the remote users to do their jobs.

But the irony is that as data centers are becoming more consolidated, users are becoming less consolidated. More people are telecommuting than ever before. (Even if the number of full-time telecommuters has gone down, part-time telecommuters rise). It makes a certain amount of sense – an employee too sick to come into work (and infect others) but not too sick to actually work might file some work from home, or sales teams might file reports from the road.

This creates a problem for most WAN Optimization solutions because most solutions require appliances at both ends of the WAN link. Telecommuters are usually accessing the applications from the public Internet. Software-based WAN optimization controllers (“Soft WOCs”) can do some of the work, but telecommuting requires high-performing broadband as well as optimization solutions.

The way that Soft WOCs work, is essentially to recreate a lightweight version of the client that normally sits at the remote end of the optimized WAN link in the software on the mobile computer. The Soft WOC then optimizes the stream between the telecommuter’s computer and the data center.

The problem is that WAN optimization is less efficient when you have a single user than when you have multiple users on the same stream. First, having multiple users accessing the same data means you can take advantage of caching. Caching is only useful on a Soft WOC link if the same user accesses the same data twice.

Secondly, in a normal optimized WAN link, there is only one TCP stream to worry about – the optimized one, with individual streams recreated only at the two ends of the transaction. Each SoftWOC essentially creates its own stream. For that reason, telecommuting solutions simply aren’t going to give you the same dramatic increase in performance you’d get from more traditional WAN Optimization.

On the other hand, any improvement is still improvement. Just be sure to baseline your performance and see if the value is there before deploying Soft WOC solutions.