In many organizations, a very small percentage of the total employees work in
HO, while the remaining are in the branch offices or out on the field. The cost
of maintaining an IT infrastructure in so many branch offices to cater to these
employees is extremely high, and not to mention complex as well. This is where
centralizing the IT infrastructure and providing connectivity over WAN links can
be a significant cost saver. But this has its own set of challenges.
The core issue of centralizing the IT hinfrastructure is that service
delivery becomes a wide area issue when your employees move away from the HQ,
and all your servers and storate move into the data center. On the other hand,
it also puts an end to the ever increasing server sprawl across branch offices,
which leads to benefits like managing costly security, management, deployment
and administration.
The need for network backups to complete on time so they can meet their
disaster recovery requirements is another thing that is putting companies under
intense pressure. The benefit; when everything is moved to the data center is
that it can be centrally monitored, backed up and configured by the centralized
IT staff.
The limitations to the consolidation trend that come into play mostly come
from technology barriers or organizational barriers which can be subjective.
Talking of technology barriers, the main problem lies in the situation when
services cannot be delivered efficiently over the WAN. This is where WAN
optimization comes into play. The term WAN optimization refers to a collection
of techniques that sharpen the performance of applications written for high
speed LANs, when they are accessed through lower speed and latency prone WANs.
Having an optimized WAN solution helps enterprises gain the benefits of
centralized servers and storage while maintaining LAN-like performance for
remote users. This is what WAN accelerators can help deliver to the
organization. When implemented properly, they can resolve performance problems
thta users typically encounter when they access applications over the
latency-prone, bandwidth-constrained, and over-utilized WAN.
A simple deployment:
Deploying a WAN accelerator for optimizing the communication between a branch
office and the data center isn't a rocket science, not conceptually at least. To
do this, you need two WAN accelerators. The equipment is placed at both ends
right after the Firewall of your network. When a packet is sent from your
network, it is accelerated by the WAN hardware and then crosses the firewall. On
the receiving end, it is accelerated right after the packet is checked at the
Firewall and vice versa.
When connecting your branch office to the data center, the WAN accelerator comes immediately after the firewall at both ends |
We tested the scenario, and the results and improvements in speed can be seen
in the product reviews (See Riverbed Steelhead product reviews in this story).
The good thing is that they can provide better performance even on lower
bandwidth.Moreover, WAN accelerators today also provide advanced features like
virtualization capabilities, which means you can consolidate all your virtual
machines on the WAN accelerator itself, thereby reducing the power requirement
and management cost in the branch offices.