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Scenario 1: Branch office to Data Center Connectivity

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PCQ Bureau
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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.

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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.

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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.

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