The Importance of Keeping Up With WAN Optimization Techniques

To understand the different techniques used by appliances offering WAN optimization, it's important to first define exactly what exactly a 'WAN' is. WAN stands for 'wide area network' and refers to any network that covers a very large geographic area. By contrast, a LAN, or local area network, refers to networks that provide internal communication in a home or small office. The internet as a whole can be defined as a WAN and is obviously a public network, while an example of a private WAN could be a corporation with offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Austin, Boston, and New York. Each individual office would have a LAN set up internally, but could also use DSL or MPLS connections to form a WAN to share information between offices.

There are a number of performance-related issues that typically occur with WANs, which has led to the development of various WAN optimization techniques. These issues can include redundant transmissions, 'chatty' protocols, and packet delivery issues. Some of the common techniques used to achieve WAN optimization include: Bandwidth Management; Caching; and Protocol Optimization. Multiple vendors offer WAN optimization appliances that use a number of these techniques to process the IP traffic traveling between the sites over the company's WAN. Not every solution uses the same techniques, thus the benefits can vary, which is important to understand when researching a vendor or supplier.

Bandwidth Management allows applications to have set limits and minimums with regard to how much bandwidth they use. For example, this technique would allow you to put a limit on the amount of bandwidth an especially avaricious application can use. Conversely, bandwidth management can ensure that less-used applications always have a guaranteed amount of bandwidth allocated to them.

Caching allows several copies of important files, especially larger ones, to be stored in multiple locations. This prevents users from having to download files as large as 20MB or 100MB across a WAN connection every time they need to view or make edits to it. Additionally, whenever modifications are made to one of these cached files, the network doesn't have to transmit the entire updated file to every one of its multiple locations. One the portions of the file that have been edited are sent.

Communication protocols for digital computer network communication have features intended to ensure reliable interchange of data over an imperfect communication channel. It is basically a way of following certain rules so that a system works properly. Protocol optimization restricts the amount of electronic chit-chat that occurs between sites when communication protocols send their necessary back and forth confirmation messages.

The implementation of these various techniques by using WAN optimization appliances has been said to reduce the usage of bandwidth by as much as 50-95% between offices communicating over the WAN. For many companies this means thousands of dollars of savings, particularly when costly solutions like multiple MPLS networks are being to ensure network reliability. For others, the value of WAN optimization is that global collaboration allows the company to undertake tasks that it previously couldn't. Regardless of the benefit or the need, understanding the latest in WAN Optimization techniques can have a substantial benefit on the performance of a modern corporation.

Charles Hughes is author of this article on WAN Optimization.

How Do You Determine the Right Wide Area Network (WAN) Architecture For a Computer Network?

One of the most complicated decisions to make for an IT department concerns the architecture for a multi-site voice/data network. Should the network be based on simple T1 point-to-point bandwidth circuits? How about burstable DS3 bandwidth or maybe a single OC3 bandwidth cloud? No matter the bandwidth chosen .... the most efficient design should base the communication backbone on a MPLS configuration (Multi-Protocol Label Switching).

To get there, first and foremost in deciding about the WAN architecture of any organization communication network you must determine ....

- How many locations you would like to connect?

- Architecture - hub and spoke or mesh architecture?

- What applications would be run on this network .... Voice, Video, Data, all of the above?

- Precisely which applications will be run in case of Data?

- What will be the % each will take up of your QoS, the total of all three should be 100%?

- Voice is the premium level QoS and hence the most expensive as it is a real time communication, followed by video and then data.

- How many users precisely will be using the network at a given point of time at each location?

- What will be the concurrency factor? Are you are looking for 100% concurrency or you can manage with lesser concurrency?

- What is the scope of scalability at each location and hub location?

- Will the access to internet also be given to users?

- Internet at a central location can help you in implementing and enforcing various security policies of your organization.

- Do you want to give access to the network resources to a mobile user?

The answer to all these questions will help in arriving at the MPLS bandwidth required at each hub and spoke location.

Honestly speaking no organization should ideally try to do this calculation themselves. Instead they can hire a consultant or a telecom service provider to do this activity as they are experts in designing this solution. With their help you can easily decide upon the bandwidth for each location, select suitable router, make redundancy plans, routing the traffic on Atlantic or pacific routes, blah blah.

For help walking through the analysis .... and determining the best solution .... take advantage of the free help at DS3-Bandwidth.com.

Ideally I also recommend to give the freedom of providing and managing the routers at each location to the Telecom service provider. Then it becomes a managed solution and the service provider can easily monitor your network in the event of an outage. They then can remotely login into the routers and manage your complete network giving you higher uptimes and SLAs.

In the end .... take a deep breath and work through the steps above, also helps to increase SharePoint Performance. Following this simple game plan will get you to the right decision for your organizations network architecture.