Geek Speak

I've deployed a number of WAN optimization devices, and have some insights into their relative effectiveness and strenghts.  We tend to work with bandwidth limited WANs (distributed, Satellite, wireless, etc...), so the strengths we've leveraged tend to more pronounced than would be the case for typical terrestrial networks, because of the unique latency and error environments.

There are loads of device manufacturers that develop performance tuning devices that are good at one or two elements of WAN performance issues, but they pale in effectiveness to multifunction devices that incorporate compression, acceleration , protocol tuning, security, etc...  The top devices are from Expand Networks, Juniper WX, Blue Coat, Packeteer and a few others.

In a nutshell, the marginal improvement that each function bring is magnified when they are combined (greater than the sum of its part, kind of thing).

The high end devices offer a good deal of visibility, control and transparency on data passing across the WAN, but I must say that I think the granularity is probably less than you might be accustomed to using more sophisticated network monitoring tools.

Maybe the ultimate point I have is that many people who don't take a look at why they have WAN performance issues or bottlenecks often make the mistake that they need more bandwidth, when they really only need to use their current bandwidth more effectively.

Have you ever utilized optimiztion solutions that are compression and acceleration based?

-Paul

Spectrale

Paul,

I have utilized some devices that are compression and acceleration based - but the effectiveness of these devices was limited to well known, TCP oriented applications.

I'm co-hosting a webinar next week with one of the experts on this subject from Riverbed. Might be a good chance to get some of these questions answered...

Josh

Nothing from Citrix itself, but after using Packeteer, I wouldn't be caught dead without some sort of WAN Optimization/Acceleration device.

After dealing with high school students (in my past job) who liked to play "Unleash-A-New-Protocol-On-The-Network" every week in order to download their MP3's and movies, Packeteer was a blessing to see in to the WAN stream. What a shock! You can learn things in class, but most of my real-world experience is from watching these students try to circumvent our devices. Very valuable on-the-job learning.

Phil

NetEqualizer is great.  We’ve really had no issues at all. We literally dropped it in line and experienced the difference (over Packeteer) right away. Complaints from students dropped as well -- MMOG worked again and we have no more AIM dropouts.