Three ways WAN optimization drives IT value

Robert Healey, Marketing Evangelist, APAC and Japan, Riverbed Technology

Over the past decade, WAN optimization has transformed from a point solution to alleviating network performance problems, into a strategic cornerstone for business application delivery. WAN acceleration technology boosts business application performance and enhances user productivity and job satisfaction.

WAN optimization can now be integrated with more flexibility, into today's diverse IT environments to accelerate business applications and data for data centre, branch office and mobile workers. Here are some ways WAN optimization can drive value across IT and business initiatives.

Speedy Returns on Investment

Historically, the value of WAN optimization was three-fold. First, it cut bandwidth use through data deduplication - "never sending the same data twice" across the network. Second, WAN optimization helped businesses overcome the performance problems associated with the regionalization and globalization of their workforces and customer bases. Applied in tandem with data center consolidation, it helped to reduce cost, increase control, and drive efficiency without impacting performance. Third, businesses can derive additional savings & efficiencies from the use of WAN optimization by eliminating the costs and administrative burden of remote IT infrastructure.

With the performance gains, end users were more productive and complained less, so IT could confidently consolidate and cut costs. Savings on server capex, support, and maintenance allow the WAN optimization business case to be straightforward and defensible. It can further be used to consolidate data centers to drive efficiency, reduce both capex and opex, and scale the infrastructure in the data center without costly upgrades.

With these great results, the ROI on a typical WAN optimization deployment is usually six months or less. As a critical enabling technology, enterprises have realized ROI in the billions of dollars from major IT initiatives made possible only with this powerful technology. But this is not the end of the story - WAN optimization has now evolved into a complete enterprise IT performance platform.

The 'Radical Roadmap"

Savvy WAN optimization vendors are now looking to take WAN optimization to entirely new places. Having continuously evolved to accelerate more protocols and make integration easier, some WAN optimization vendors have by now moved the technology to the next level, to optimize virtual storage, servers, and desktop services. This can completely change the IT consolidation landscape by enabling centralization of branch office storage and even VDI infrastructure. It will also help build a better branch office box solution to dramatically simplify the edge of the network. WAN optimization technology has also been extended to optimize cloud storage services, enabling data acceleration and deduplication off premise to make Cloud storage services faster and cheaper.

Although the benefits of WAN optimization are well understood, choosing a technology implementation isn't just about what it can do today - it's also about where the technology provider plans to take their solutions tomorrow. Here are some considerations that should be discussed with providers before any purchase decision:

Mobility - Does the provider deliver a fully integrated mobility solution? The same acceleration technology used in the data center and branch office should also support Mobile device acceleration for a variety of platforms, to drive the best possible performance and ROI across the integrated performance system.

Cloud and virtualization - As cloud-based IT services (in various forms) become more important, it's essential that WAN optimization can extend to support acceleration of remote IT applications and services from multiple vendors. Any credible WAN optimization provider should have a technology vision and the right business relationships to make this happen. They should also be able to talk with customers about performance results for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS type Cloud acceleration.

Disaster recovery (DR) - Since consolidation has become so important for driving IT efficiency, it's vital to consider DR applications of this technology. With fewer sites becoming more important to everyday operations, robust DR operations become essential. WAN optimization can make DR processes an order of magnitude faster more cost effective. For reliable DR operations and peace of mind, WAN optimization should be certified with the major backup software applications and storage vendors in use, such as EMC, NetApp, HP, Hitachi, IBM, and others. A decision to later switch storage providers shouldn't mean a switch of WAN optimization providers as well, so plan accordingly.

Driving Strategic Decisions

Because WAN optimization sits at the intersection of applications, networking, and storage, its potential benefits goes well beyond what enterprises may initially realize. To fully appreciate this requires an understanding of how applications and networks perform today. Leading WAN optimization solutions have the ability to provide deep visibility into application performance.

Smart visibility tools can baseline what is "normal‟ performance and alert IT administrators to any abnormal performance characteristics. Such visibility tools also provide high-level information for business managers and technical leaders looking to help them understand business application performance and how it may be impacting the organization.

With a deeper understanding of how the business uses its networked resources, WAN optimization can more intelligently accelerate applications and storage throughout the business. This is where the core optimization value still comes into play. What has evolved over time is how and where optimization takes place.

In addition to making remote server centralization possible without performance problems, the best WAN optimization solutions deliver "branch office box" capabilities by using virtualization to allow flexible deployment of other services directly on the device. This allows items like print servers, Active Directory, DNS/DHCP, streaming media, firewalls, routers, and even custom applications to be deployed in the branch without any additional hardware. In addition to saving thousands per branch in capex costs, this cuts energy costs and contributes to any green initiatives.

All of the above capabilities should be taken into consideration when organisations consider the applications, use cases and ROI of WAN optimization technology; the chosen solution should support both the corporate IT infrastructure as it is today, and the desired future architectures and services.