Seven ways to boost application performance

"Our network is scattered across the country with 82 field offices and 10 regional locations. Our field offices don't have local servers, and they had pretty slow lines," says Chris Finucane, CTO for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General in Washington, D.C. "We optimized the network and upgraded all our links to T-1 lines, and the field offices didn't notice a huge difference. That's when we realized bandwidth can't be everything and we needed to investigate other means to improve application performance."

Finucane's challenge is not unique, according to industry watchers who say today's increasingly complex applications simply aren't designed to run smoothly across large distributed networks that support branch, remote and mobile workers. That has network executives scrambling to invest in new technologies - such as application acceleration and WAN optimization tools - and others working with system administrators and application developers to tweak internal servers and fine-tune application code. We spoke with a handful of network professionals and industry analysts to get their advice on how to boost application performance across a network.

1. Emulate WAN conditions.

Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. That's the premise behind products that simulate network - specifically WAN - conditions to help network managers (and application developers) get a handle on how an application will behave on a given network under certain conditions.