Some WAN Acceleration & Optmization Solutions

Tata Rao, Sr. Vice President, Systems Engineering, Cisco India and
SAARC

1. Need for unified WAN services

A change is occurring in the enterprise business model. The global scope of the
enterprise is increasing, with many large enterprises now supporting worldwide,
24-hour operations. New types of content-rich applications are being deployed,
as well as real-time collaborative services that incorporate voice and video.
And with an increasingly mobile workforce, as well as the need to provide secure
access to business partners and contractors, the traditional domain boundaries
of the network are also beginning to shift.

Nowhere in the network are these changes felt more acutely than on the WAN
edge. As a result, the typical requirements placed on a WAN edge aggregation
router have expanded. Formerly, the WAN edge router was seen as a place in the
network where speed and scalability were the main criteria for success.
Progressively, the role of the enterprise WAN edge router has evolved into a
consolidated focal point for rich services such as voice, multimedia, and
real-time collaboration and commerce.

Increasingly, network designers, system administrators, and IT staff are
being challenged to provide more sophisticated services at the WAN edge with
greater levels of resiliency, security, and application intelligence.

One approach that some network architects have considered is a design that
incorporates multiple single-function, high-performance network appliances.
Although this approach can resolve many of the challenges cited previously,
ultimately it becomes a question of economics and manageability, because this
model leads to:

• Increased training, testing, deployment, and integration overheads.
• Additional real estate and power requirements.
• Duplicate hardware and software maintenance and support costs.
• Further expenditures for hardware redundancy and sparing.
• Supplier management complexities with multiple WAN devices.
• Operational inconsistency and service interoperability problems.

2. Issue of heavy traffic on the Internet (Web 2.0 applications)
interfering with business productivity

Business today requires us to navigate complex inter-company networks of
customers, colleagues and partners. In today's global business environment,
sustainable competitive advantages will be realized by companies that move
quickly to embrace collaborative processes and tools that allow their employees,
customers and partners to intelligently connect and interact anytime, anywhere,
via any device. Employees realize the advantages of being able to connect and
share information with Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook, LinkedIn, wikis, etc.

Employee expectations, alongwith the competitive environment, have put
increasing pressure on business executives to quickly embrace collaborative
processes and tools. But current technology alternatives are difficult to deploy
and integrate. Most have long deployment cycles, don't scale to mobile
workspaces and lack business controls. As a result, people can't connect and
communicate across firewalls or corporate boundaries. This leaves companies with
the challenge of how to combine the reach, speed and flexibility of Web 2.0
tools without compromising the security, reliability and policy of their
networks.

Cisco WAN acceleration Solution

WAN and Application Optimization solution: Cisco WAN optimization is an architectural solution comprising of set of tools and techniques working together to improve performance of applications running across WAN. Cisco has 'network as platform' approach where network is made aware of applications running on it. Below is brief introduction about the various components of this architecture. Monitoring: This component constitutes of tools using which applications running on network are identified and categorized based on relevance. Here most relevant application is one that is critical for business. Classification: Work of this part is to make network application aware and automatically discover and control applications running on network. Optimization: Number of tools and techniques are used to improve performance of application and other traffic on network. Control: This part include QoS and traffic management techniques, making business critical application and traffic high on priority Network management: This part is to manage network resources in best possible way, policies can be created centrally and then deployed on network appliances. WAAS Wide area application service or WAAS is WAN optimization solution that accelerates application over the WAN. WAAS solution is based on WAAS software that run on three set of hardware appliances. Network modules ISR 2800 and 3800 series. WAE (wide area application engine) family of appliances and WAVE (wide area virtualization engine)family of appliances. One of the features of WAAS solution is the validation by application vendor and easy network integration that in turn results in lower total cost of ownership.

Here is the architectural diagram showing different components of WAN and application optimization framework