Tell Us What You Think of Cisco’s WAAS

I have deployed WAAS throughout the US in a large WAN environment and have been ever bit impressed each time we install a new unit. We have been able to remove servers from remote facilities and eliminate the backup and administrative duties associated with remote server support. With the Cisco Wide Area File Services component, we were able to move user home directories to a central location in the data center across the WAN. Previously we had a difficult time scheduling virus patching and OS patching. With Cisco WAAS, we don't have to worry about that any more. The bandwidth is there for us to keep our remote users up to date. That was a huge value add to our installations.

Across the board, we have seen improvements on all of the business critical applications, Lotus Notes, WWW, FTP, CIFS, MS Office, RDP, etc.

On average we see performance from 5x -25x improvement although I have personally seen as much as 2000KB/sec (15mbps) on 256Kbps Frame Relay link. Impressive!!!!

WCCP makes the install seamless and quick plus we have no outage requirements for an install. We can turn it on and off without affecting existing traffic flows.

Each WAAS install takes about 10 mins from start to finish to get the unit up and operational and joined to the Central Manager. Once registered we push out our default policies, set the WAN bandwidth for WAFS, and off we go. We spend the rest of the time showing off the performance to the users. They love it.

Awesome product!!!!!

We are with a leading engineering and energy management firm. One of our key requirements for WAN optimization was the ability to accelerate our Bentley ProjectWise document management system as well as AutoCAD application. This allows us to maintain compliance with our branch server centralization strategy, while still maximizing our consultant billable hours and revenue through LAN-like performance over the WAN.

Throughout the past 18 months we are saving $4,000 to $7,000 a month on bandwidth, and have gained about $1.2 million net benefits through more productive consultants. The Cisco WAAS solution we picked gave us additional ease-of-operations and management advantages, because of its transparent integration with our WAN QoS, Security, VoIP, and monitoring services. We can continue to use these services with the visibility we need, the saying "you can't manage if you can't see" definitely applies to us. Because of the industry we're in and the size of the datasets we work with, implementing a WAN optimization technology was a no-brainer, and Cisco's WAAS solution has not only delivered on the promised ROI but delivered sooner than we ever imagined.

Jeff Gill and Hugh Barnett, A&I Team
Michael Baker Corporation

As the District Manager of a Cisco VAR, I've been heavily involved in several WAAS projects in the past 12 months.

I worked as a Regional Sales Director for AT&T for over 5 years, and I can say that we ALWAYS recommended solutions of typical "bandwidth issues" with...you guessed it...more bandwidth.

Today..to the decision makers in my larger accounts, folks with mulitple domestic and international locations connected by a WAN, the natural FIRST step is not to add more bandwidth, but to optimize the network that exists (and is budgeted for!!!) today.

As a sales organization, we like WAAS becasue it delivers what it promises...and it "slots" into the customer's edge strategy nicely. Many accounts are in the process of...or contemplating...edge upgrades, and the Cisco ISR platform can come bundled with WAAS up front, or WAAS can be added later.

A handful of customers have opted to "proof of concept" the technology on "representative" locations, and they have all shown massive reductions in traffic (lowest was 30%, highest was 84%). These PoCs led directly to large purchases. I strongly believe that WAAS will become a default part of all network edge strategies, because within the next 12 months, the data on optimization results will be massive and irrefutable.

The City of Fort Wayne executed a Proof of Concept with the Cisco WAAS in 2006. We expected the WAAS to eliminate the need for remote servers and provide near LAN (Local Area Network) performance over slower WAN links (generally T1).

We successfully tested a wide area network file and print caching solution to a remote site on a T1 link. This test included the creation of a file share and a print server. The users at the remote site where able to manipulate data and print SAN based file share and print server.

Expected Functionality at the end of Proof of Concept:

WAAS

I. Wide area file storage and print services function at near local area network performance
II. Users find the performance at an acceptable rate
III. The WAN link does not experience high utilization due to file pulls to the client from the WAAS engine.
IV. The WAAS engine is capable of caching a reasonable amount of data to prevent high WAN link utilization.

Fort Wayne’s first step was to test file transfer speeds across the WAN from the file servers in the data center to one fire department. Before WAAS was installed, the link was completely saturated; after installation, WAN traffic decreased by 40 to 50 percent. On some days, WAN traffic dropped as much as 61 percent by utilizing WAAS because the Cisco WAAS solution pre-positions and compresses files that remote users access over the WAN. Thus, end users are now experiencing LAN-like speed.

Fort Wayne officially accepted the Cisco-proposed solution. Performance was a big factor in our decision, but we also recognized and appreciated the superior implementation of the Cisco acceleration platform. After evaluating all of the alternatives, we feel that Cisco has entered the market with the best technology in this arena.

The City of Fort Wayne continues to use this technology with confidence.

As a Cisco Partner focusing in the Healthcare and Financial Vertical Markets I have several customers that after performing a Proof of Concept with both Cisco and riverbed - chose Cisco. In many situations my customer's have chosen Cisco for these reasons:

1. Transparent integration to the LAN/WAN.
2. Ability to support Unified Communications seamlessly.
3. Ability to utilize the inherent security features of Cisco routers such as IPS, Firewall, etc.

One large healthcare customer in Ohio deployed Riverbed prior to Cisco having the WAAS solution that has since completely replaced Rivebed with Cisco WAAS. This customer is utilizing WAAS for their PACS applications between their 7 remote sites connected via PtP T1s.

Another customer in the Manufacturing vertical market that deployed Cisco WAAS as a way of consolidating their data centers. This customer had 2 data centers spread across the Ohio and California. We performed the PoC with WAAS appliances and subsequently deployed a WAAS solution that allowed all remote users to connect to 1 data center. This customer has not increased bandwidth for any of their sites.

We are an acute hospital operator and have been using Cisco WAAS for our WAN acceleration for connectivity between the hospitals and our data center. We started testing early in beta with the Cisco WAE. We compared it to Riverbed and Juniper. The thing that we found that the WAE stood out from the rest was the transparency. Riverbed and Juniper both natted the packets across the WAN where Cisco did not. This was integral in our deployment time since it did not affect our current security posture.

We have deployed over 60 Cisco WAAS devices worldwide, 20 in the US. We evaluated several solutions before deciding to use Cisco WAAS, and our experience has been great. The WAAS helped us reduce expenses significantly thru datacenter consolidation. Users that had local servers notice little, if any, difference when all the servers were removed. We extensively use prepositioning to place file server data and SMS packages in the cache off hours. Our experience with other Cisco products made deploying Cisco WAAS easy.

We are an agency with offices in over 70 countries -- many of which have little or no infrastructure in terms of telecommunications. We are currently deploying a global unified network utilizing VPNs for connectivity, and nearly 30 percent of our offices have low bandwidth VSAT connections with over 500ms latency. WAAS has proved itself as the only product which could give us effective levels of performance with our bandwidth constraints, and integrate directly into our systems.
There a few factors that have made WAAS a hit for us, over the competitors:

1. In terms of optimization, we are seeing about 50% reduction in overall traffic (a huge performance boost for sites running 256k links). This includes file sharing, directory services, messaging, and web. (We are also looking forward to the version that can accelerate encrypted HTTP traffic). Some services such as file sharing have been optimized up to %2000.

2. WAAS integrates directly into our existing Cisco infrastructure -- we have integrated service modules inside our routers overseas and a WAE cluster talking directly to our core switches at our main office in the US. The WCCP utilization is great as there is no requirement for an inline connection -- if there is a WAAS restart from a software upgrade, or if we turn WAAS completely off, WCCP simply bypasses WAAS policies and sends the traffic directly to its destination.

3. Our IPS / IDS devices do not "break" WAAS traffic.

4. Setup and configuration has been relatively simple -- we had our first test implementation up and running in our lab within a day.