Cisco WAAS Product

I've had very good experiences with the Cisco WAAS products. We have deployed the WAAS product for just bandwidth reduction across the WAN. For Oracle-based applications we were seeing 20x throughput increases. In another instance we were getting 10-12Mb of throughput across a T-1 circuit on a consistant basis just from the compression and optimization. The product does work as expected with easy deployment and minimal configuration.

The central management console of the product is good for administering the remote appliances so you don't have to create individual policies and manage each appliance seperately. Creating rulesets and reporting on the boxes is good on the current version and appears to be getting an enhancement on new version coming out in June/July.

I would highly recommend this product for other companies just based on the throughput increases. The other capabilities such as CIFS file sharing and the new virtual Windows Server 2008 are appealing and worth a look for any organization. I've seen from other companies how you can really optimize your Microsoft SMS environment by utilizing WAAS boxes for your remote software deployment instead of putting various SMS servers out at every site.