WAN Acceleration technologies aim to accelerate a broad range of applications and protocols over the Wide Area Network. They typically employ a number of acceleration techniques including low level compression, intelligent bit wise compression and specific protocol optimization.

Why Not Add Bandwidth?

Adding more bandwidth does not necessarily improve the end performance of an application over the WAN.

The performance profile of many applications is defined by the latency of the connection. Adding more bandwidth will help with the concurrency of the connection but will not improve latency.  This is because most protocols have an element of serialization meaning that they require a response to a packet of data before they can send the next one. Clearly with more bandwidth more ‘conversations’ can happen at the same time but more bandwidth can not speed up the time it takes to send and receive a packet of data.

WAN acceleration does address the latency issue by being very selective about the data that is sent over the WAN at both a protocol and application layer.

Many protocols such as CIFS (Windows file share) were not originally designed to perform well over a WAN connection. They are very serialized and ‘chatty’, meaning that a very large amount of serialized control traffic is required to send a relatively small amount of data.  A WAN accelerator can reduce the amount of data transmitted over the network by using low level compression and caching. In addition it can emulate the end point. This means that it can respond to a lot of the control type traffic locally. The two WAN acceleration devices can have an optimized conversation using an efficient propriety protocol designed for the WAN. The other end point can reassemble the data and reintroduce the chatty control traffic.

This is a very high level explanation but it aims to give the reader an idea of how the visible effects of latency can be reduced using this type of technology and, point out that in many cases, adding more bandwidth will not solve WAN performance issues.


Who Should Use WAN Acceleration?

WAN acceleration technology can be used by any organization that has a WAN and would like faster end user experience or make better use of their existing infrastructure. This could be because they want to achieve the following:

There are a number of vendors entering this growing market space ranging from financed start-ups through to incumbents with acquired technology.  jetNEXUS Solutions have investigated a number of these vendors, and as such, made the decision to work with and become a premier partner of Riverbed. The decision to partner with Riverbed is based on a number of commercial and technological factors.

Riverbed technology now has a proven track record of successfully implementing this technology from small SME to large global Enterprises. With frequent releases including the addition of substantial new features to their RiOS 5.0 operating system, Riverbed have proven to be innovators in the market in addition to established leaders. Due to the success of the Riverbed technology, sales have seen significant growth resulting in the acquisition of 3500 customers. Riverbed is a publically trading billion dollar corporation.

Gartner have placed Riverbed as market leaders in their magic quadrant for the last two years running. Click here to read Gartner's full report.

Riverbed utilise a number of WAN acceleration methods under their RiOS operating system to offer incredible acceleration. Below is a diagram which displays the magnitude of the acceleration possible.