For the third installment in our "ADS Customers Speak" series we ask Juniper customers to share their experiences with Juniper's WX solution.
Juniper got into the distributed (a.k.a. dual-ended) ADS market by buying Peribit, the layer 3 compression and caching pioneer. Juniper integrated the Peribit product in 2005 and renamed it the Juniper WX. Juniper's WX application acceleration solution optimizes traffic flows by applying compression and caching techniques, quality of service (QoS) enforcement, bandwidth management, path optimization, and TCP acceleration, as well as acceleration of HTTP, Microsoft CIFS and Microsoft MAPI-based applications.
The WX appliance uses sophisticated compression technology that captures data patterns of almost any size and catalogs them in a dictionary. When the WX recognizes subsequent instances of a pattern, it replaces the pattern with a reference to the dictionary. Even portions of files are recognized as a pattern-so if a file is a modified version of another file, large file "chunks" will be common and therefore will not be retransmitted across the WAN.
Reducing WAN bandwidth demand enables more users to share the same link, often alleviating the need for WAN link upgrades as traffic grows. In an office where the same data is viewed by multiple users, bandwidth savings and performance improvement can be dramatic.
Juniper's WX product also implements QoS that recognizes packet markings established by upstream sources, and prioritizes packets on out-bound queues accordingly. Implementing QoS ensures that real-time and interactive traffic experience low latency and perform reliably even if the network is congested.
TCP acceleration overcomes traffic delays caused by long latency links. By strategically modifying the behavior of TCP, the WX can increase data throughput for each application flow, shortening response times. Juniper's WX products enable global reach by offering excellent user experiences even in extremely remote, infrastructure-challenged rural areas.
If you have deployed a Juniper WX solution tell us what you think. Does it live up to your expectations? What were your impressions? A simple "I like it", "I have mixed feelings", or "I hate it" response is fine--but if you have insight to share with the community, then talk all you want. You can post a reply to this blog using your name or anonymously.
If you are using another vendor's product, your turn will come in a future blog.
NetForecast is an internationally recognized engineering consulting company that benchmarks, analyzes, and improves the performance of networked data, voice, and video applications.
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Good product / fantastic
Good product / fantastic support!
Excellent monitoring, report
Excellent monitoring, report and traffic visibility.
A little more complex to configure than first apparent as you need to setup QoS so compression will work, you need to setup compression if you want acceleration to work, you need to setup QoS if you want acceleration to work, etc. Basically you must configure all features to get any one feature to work right.
Even works very well with VoIP - compressing headers as well as QoS, freeing up bandwidth for the voice packets, etc.
It capabilities cover everything. If you want to do something, if your network can only do something a certain way, the WX has you covered.
BTW - only buy the WXC, not the WX, even though most people call them all WX's. The C models add Network Sequence Caching and hard drives to the units. Worth the extra money.
WXC and VOIP performance
I was interested in read that you found that the WXC gave some performance gains for VOIP. I am working on a network which will carry a lot of VOIP and had considered bypassing VOIP traffic as it is heavily compressed. Do you have an figures for the performance gains achived for VOIP traffic?
Juniper WX
I have deployed couple of WX/WXC boxes, works great, easy to deploy, The caching feature is really great.
But have know where exactly place the box when there is firewall and ipsec router involved.
Satellite Performance Gains
I have deployed in excess of 80 WXC units in a satellite network environment giving over 4 x end user experience gains.
Great product.
WX rocks
This product has simply been a godsend for ensuring a healthier network, especially between my remote, Asia Pac sites, which constantly had connectivity trouble.
As great as the product is, the Juniper support has been even better.
5 Stars!
Awesome product
Our company uses both the WXC 250 and 500 models. They saved our company a ton of money since we did not have to purchase extra bandwidth for our remote offices. The product does as advertised and then some!
The previous user's comment about only buying the WXC model is spot-on. If you're going to throw money at WAN acceleration, go the whole way with the hard drive caching (WXC).
QoS can sometimes be confusing if you have other downsteam devices/routers also doing QoS of their own. So if you do, read the documentation carefully.
Support is spectacular!
The one beef I have is the lagging-behind of on-screen(web interface) directions, as they conflict with the latest documentation available via Juniper's support website. Of course it does not take much to figure out which version you should trust, but for a new user is does cause some initial confusion.
However, if you company is using Exchange and you want these devices to help with compression/acceleration with Exchange/MAPI traffic, do determine if you company is, or is planning, using Outlook's MAPI over https, or also known as "Outlook Anywhere" as all traffic between the client (Outlook) and the Exchange server will be encrypted using SSL. If so, then the WXC will be of no use since it cannot accelarate SSL/HTTPS traffic. In fact, we have found that Outlook Anywhere without the WXC devices performs just as good. But if you plan on staying with straight Outlook MAPI calls then get a WXC device for sure! Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but this has been our experience.
Companies looking at this solution may also be interested in coupling the WXC devices with Microsoft's Remote Differential Compression and DFS File Replication initially introduce in Windows Server 2003 (R2). Currently our company has not tried both together, yet initial investigations look promising.
Correction to Post by Mike Lee - "Awesome product".
Mike - WXOS5.5 released late 2007 introduced support for acceleration of SSL / HTTPS traffic. You might want to try this.
WXC-590
I don't like it. We had the Orbital, which was much better. Juniper's graphs and reporting are terrible.
That is about the best thing I can say.
Good and getting better
After reading some of the comments posted, I'd have to agree that the WX was plagued with some issues in the past. However, I have seen Juniper step up to the plate recently to make this a more viable solution for partners and consumers.
It is easier to setup and configure. (It is no longer necessary to configure QoS to get compression/acceleration working)
It is more stable. (Juniper has moved to fewer code trains and have spent a lot of time and resources cleaning up the bugs in the code.)
It works!
With the new WXC line here with larger hard drives and more powerful hardware, I'm looking forward to seeing what features they implement soon. The SSL optimization feature was great and I'm hoping an HTTP optimization feature is in the works.