Accelerating your WAN
Tuesday, 09 June 2009 12:46.
I still remember the delight when my dad upgraded our dusty 9.6Kbps modem to a 56kbps. At the time it was a massive improvement and websites seemed to fly down to the PC, but then as links became faster, the websites became richer, embedding audio and video and soon it seemed as if the Internet had ground to a halt again. The same can be said of many corporate WAN links. That 1Mbps leased line may have seemed to be lightning fast at first but as more and more files and applications are migrated to the data centre to save operational costs, the users begin to complain again of poor network performance. Files that were once held locally are now hundreds or even thousands of miles away and having to contend with a much smaller amount of bandwidth and higher latency. Consequently, that word document that was once so quick to open on the local file server now appears to freeze and all you can do is bash the keyboard in frustration.
Throwing bandwidth at the problem will help to a certain extent but for transcontinental or satellite links with high latency, that fat OC-3 pipe you purchased seems to dribble out FTP traffic at a paltry 4Mbps. Soon nightly backups are overrunning and getting behind schedule and users are complaining.
So what do you do?
Simple, you reduce the latency. There are sophisticated devices available which will significantly improve the speed of WAN links, in many cases bring near-LAN speeds to remote offices with 1Mbps connections. These devices achieve this improvement in many ways including data-deduplication, TCP protocol optimisation, data compression and local caching. In environments where CIFS transfers are particularly heavy these WAN acceleration devices can bring gains of up to 100x speed improvement after an initial warm up period of a few days.
Suddenly that small 1Mb link appears to be much larger than it actually is and all without the huge hike in bandwidth costs!
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