Here are my 2 cents:

As any technology oriented to WAN Optimization, the first step should be professional sizing of the expected results and a proper assessment of the existing infrastructure.

Sizing should include a clear understanding of focal effects directly related to productivity and savings as well as detailed technical planning, as commented elsewhere.

Once a proper sizing and planning is done, the WAN optimization deployment should fit pretty well in the infrastructure and performs usually as expected with minor adjustments and rare disruptions in the network traffic.

Regarding specifically Cisco’s WAAS solution and the ISR products, the fact of putting too much functionality in one box is an issue; the decision to use all of it is matter of choice.

This trend is not new neither in hardware nor in software. Modularity and multi functional devices are part of most technologies available today, including printers, cell phones, home appliances etc. and off course switches, routers, firewalls etc. Obviously the network architect’s choice determines which model to follow and what level of modularity fits her/his target SLA better.

WAN optimization benefits are as huge and undeniable as server centralization, consolidation and virtualization, which cause actually the hype about this technology. The ROI and TCO, even handled in a very conservative manner, show very appealing times and savings in bandwidth costs, productivity increases and bandwidth release for other uses, like real time applications. Even awfully made ROI analysis are attractive in less than a year projection, so, this technology will get financial support as well as high expectations. Be prepared for both.

Be aware to consider management for Wan Optimization: Policy distribution and MTTR could be a mess without it. All major vendors in this space have a sort of management appliance that relief configuration, reporting and performance automation.

As today there is no interoperability grounds to consider a mixed vendor scenario, I think it would be better to consider a single brand, and if the scale comes down to medium to very small sites, the ISRs would have the advantage of reducing gear that is located far from the enterprise IT reach, not meaning that the ISR is the only way to deploy WAN Optimization in small sites, but it just seems the wiser to me.

Regards:

Luis Guembes
Technology & Telecom Manager
Adexus Peru S.A.