This week we're testing some WAN acceleration gear in the lab and since its on my mind now and has been for a few weeks I thought I'd spend some time talking about WAN performance, optimization, and acceleration.
Management of WAN connections can be a real bugger. Many of us "cut our teeth" as network engineers troubleshooting WAN circuit problems, arguing with our service providers about link states, and trying to figure out DLCI problems on frame-relay PVCs. Seems like nowadays the problems we see on WAN circuits are different. It's not so much that the links are unreliable from an availability perspective, but that they are unreliable from a performance perspective. Part of these problems are self-induced I suppose. When a companies decide to rollout new applications, we're sometimes the last ones to hear about it irrespective of the fact that the application may have significant requirements in the areas of WAN latency and bandwidth (and they wonder why they don't work right). These applications combined with VoIP, Video over IP, SaaS, and a general increase in internet usage from the workplace have caused a surge in the usage and expectations for our WANs (nobody was watching YouTube 3 years ago).
Anyhow, I'm going to dive into some of the key components of WAN optimization in later posts this week. Drop me a line if you have a particular interest and I'll try to add some content in that area.
p.s. I'm taking a trip out West to meet with a few of the leading vendors that provide WAN optimization and acceleration technologies. Let me know if there's any information I can gather for you while out there.
Flame on...Josh
Were currently testing the Big IP and CISCO AVS line of products. Our biggest systems utilize the browser and not a fat client and our bigger sites like Dubai and west africa have ping times of around 280 -350ms. So far we have at least doubled the performance of the Peoplesoft environment and am currently trying the BigIP box to accellerate MatrixOne (javarich).
WAN performance over the VPNs has been getting worse via the cloud over the last few years , especially w/ the increased used of metro ethernet services. We have found from experience that you can get 25mb from the local area but trying to extend 25mb beyond the borders is fair to none.
I can honestly say, I have looked at them all and our company now is a reseller for what I have found to be the best overall solution for this predicament.
Packeteer Packetshapers are by far the best overall product for these issues. They give you the BEST layer 7 visibility of whats going on in your network in conjunction with a significant ammount of ways to control your applications that are eatting up all your bandwidth. Additionally they offer real time TCP compression and TCP accelloration within the same units.
They on top of all this have another product line for CIFs WAFs acceloration as well.
Please check them out at http://www.packeteer.com
Also if you want an EVAL, just hit me up with a private email here..
I haven't used the Packeteer devices. Do you manage them from Orion?
Josh
well I Monitor them from Orion, however I cannot effectively manage them from Orion till we get Custom Mib TABLES cough cough cough :)