For digital rights management provider Navio Systems, speeding content over distributed networks is essential to its business. When the time came to upgrade existing T-1 lines to DS-3 connectivity, IT managers at the Cupertino, Calif.-based company investigated another option: WAN optimization.

"We were looking to expand our connectivity and increase the bandwidth among our offices and data center, and then we started to look at acceleration tools from F5 Networks, Packeteer and Peribit," says Will Lee, director of operations at Navio. Having been an F5 Big-IP customer for the past few years and seeing how the company's new WANJet appliances could handle file transfers, Lee opted to invest in more products from F5.

"When we started with F5's Big IP product line, it was part of our planning, architecture and design to include something just a bit more intelligent than traditional load balancers," Lee says. "We needed some appliance logic that could route traffic across out network based on certain rules and patterns, and the Big IPs are very flexible."

F5 acquired Swan Labs last year and added the company's WAN optimization technology to F5's own Layer 4-7 switching and application traffic management products and Big-IP switches.

Lee reports now, after having beta-tested the 4.0 version of the software loaded onto WANJet appliances, that Navio has experienced significant time-savings in large file transfers. He says a transfer that could eat up time and bandwidth for three days is now down to about five hours. And considering the time-savings, estimates the WANJet appliances will pay for themselves within six months.

"WANJet does a good job of accelerating the Windows transfer protocol CIFS," Lee says. "WANJet gave us the equivalent of a DS-3 without having to upgrade our T-1s."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.