Maximizing WAN Optimization

Donato Buccella reveals the major trends driving the evolution of WAN optimization technologies.

“WAN optimization technology is a fundamental component for the successful delivery of cloud services”
-Donato Buccella

Virtualization and cloud computing (private or public cloud services) are major trends that are driving more and more traffic over wide area network (WAN) links. These trends require a shift in the way business managers view enabling the access to such centralized resources as applications, servers, storage and management systems by geographically dispersed users, whether they are in a branch office, connecting over the internet or subscribing to an application provider.

A successful deployment of centralized services requires that the user experience (application response time and data transfer time) is as close as possible to what users would experience accessing the same resources over a local area network. The WAN's inherent latency issues and the cost of network bandwidth are major obstacles to business managers' efforts to deploy these new computing paradigms in a timely and cost-effective manner. WAN optimization technology is a fundamental component and a requirement for the successful delivery of centralized services or cloud services. Since cloud services' infrastructure relies on virtualization for its implementation, the right WAN optimization solution utilizes virtualization technologies to deliver deployment flexibility, consistent performance and scalability in order to be cost effective. WAN optimization technology integrated with virtualization is the virtual network that carries this new generation of computing services.

There are differences in the way WAN optimization and application acceleration vendors approach virtualization. Certeon believes that WAN optimization must seamlessly integrate with an existing virtual infrastructure, and therefore it must be delivered as a standard workload, or virtual appliance (VA) that is hosted in an enterprise-class hypervisor, such as VMware ESX or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. In this way, the WAN optimization solution gains all the functionality provided by the virtual infrastructure vendor, such as high availability and centralized management via the virtual infrastructure vendor management system. Being a VA allows for the effective utilization of resources in existing physical hardware without requiring dedicated hardware to just support WAN optimization. A WAN optimization VA can be provisioned (allocate CPU, memory, and disk resources) according to the required load (number of connections and bandwidth) for a specific application. The fact that a VA interfaces with the virtual network capabilities of the virtual infrastructure provides much more flexibility to support different network topologies and connection types.

Other vendors try to provide virtualization technology (virtual machine hosting software and hardware) embedded within their dedicated WAN optimization hardware. These offerings are underpowered and do not integrate with enterprise hypervisor-based virtual infrastructures, such as VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.

Another key factor is scalability. Virtualized WAN optimization must linearly scale as resources are added. Independent testing from The Tolly Group bears out the performance and scalability benefits that a VA, such as Certeon's aCelera, brings to virtualized enterprises. aCelera Virtual Appliance software supports VMware ESX/ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. The Tolly tests demonstrated that aCelera, running on an industry-standard server, can achieve a 99 percent reduction in remote file access response time over a high-latency WAN. In addition, aCelera supports over 50 percent more concurrent accelerated connections than do competitive hardware appliances. These tests also showed that aCelera utilizes less than 30 percent of the system's CPU and memory resources, enabling room to scale the number of accelerated connections as needed, without requiring a "forklift" upgrade to a larger system. aCelera software also reduces network bandwidth utilization by 95 percent, enabling you to leverage your existing WAN infrastructure and eliminate the cost of purchasing additional bandwidth. In pricing analyses, where an aCelera configuration was compared against single-purpose hardware appliances, aCelera showed a more than 60 percent reduction in network optimization capital, operating and network bandwidth costs.

Increased WAN optimization, application performance, and scalability, as well as reduced network bandwidth utilization, are the cornerstones of enabling virtualization and cloud computing environments. In order to support these dynamic environments, your choice of WAN optimization and application acceleration solutions requires the basic dynamic principles that only virtual appliances can deliver.