Newman,

Great article. You address a lot of the key factors that we talk to our customers about. I would says that most of our customers are looking at application acceleration for server consolidation, disaster recovery and data replication, as well as freeing up existing bandwidth for new applications to run well like VoIP and Video. The tunneling approach doesn't work in my experience. It's a nightmare when scaling up to many sites when they need to talk to each other and it can screw up QoS/CoS over MPLS networks. Your best bet is Riverbed for accelerating applications. They are the best of breed solution out there. I work for a Cisco Partner that is also partnered with Riverbed, because they have the best WAN optimization technology. I have a lot of comparison data on all the competitors if anyone is interested. Forrester, Gartner, etc...

Justin Lofton
Systems Engineer
Tredent Data Systems, Inc.
WAN Optimization Specialists

http://www.tredent.com

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