Great advice! In my experience, its important to have each vendor do an evaluation of their solution in your production environment as well as be sure to have them evaluate them at more than 2 sites at a time. As many of the solutions out there don't scale well and a 2 site demo can cover up this shortfall of many solutions. Another key factor is product setup. Make sure your staff works with each vendor to understand what it takes to deploy the solution because once you decide to purchase a solution it will be your baby unless you go with a managed WAN optimization service. Lastly, be sure to think about these products from a long term business perspective. They have a lot of WOW factor to them and I have seen some IT folks focus too much on their current pain points rather than the bigger picture of virtualization (both for servers and desktops), server and storage consolidation, backup and replication, disaster recovery and addressing mobile workers, telecommuters and executives that travel. Sometimes you can fix today's problems with a cheaper solution but that can cost you a lot more over the life of that original investment. If you follow these guidelines you should be able to determine which solution works best in your environment with the applications you have today as well as applications that will be deployed during the life of the solution you purchase.

Justin Lofton
Systems Engineer

Tredent Data Systems, Inc.
Application Acceleration Information

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