Data center and server consolidation are popular trends among IT managers looking to reduce costs and operations expenses across multiple locations. But oftentimes reducing servers translates directly into increasing the number of applications being delivered over the WAN - which can wreak havoc on the end-user experience.

Application performance issues crop up when network latency, constrained bandwidth and chatty applications prevent traffic from efficiently traveling between clients and servers. For Arun Desouza, chief information security officer at Inergy Automotive Systems in Troy, Mich., accelerating applications over the WAN helped him ensure application performance to distributed end users didn't suffer when his company completed a server consolidation project.

Desouza opted to work with application traffic management vendor Packeteer. To date, he has installed about 36 Packeteer PacketShapers distributed around the world to help speed applications. The applications are currently served up from about 160 servers, which had been consolidated down from about 225. He says he was aware the efforts to reduce the number of servers in geographically distributed offices also introduced a potential performance problem for end users.

"We have a portal that is centralized in the data center that users access through a VPN, and we wanted to ensure that casual Internet browsing didn't kill legitimate traffic, such as SAP," Desouza explains. "Using Packeteer we could prioritize business application traffic, not throw bandwidth at the problem - bandwidth is not so cheap in Europe - and guarantee better use of the network."

According to Desouza, establishing policies for internal and external traffic and putting Packeteer to work enabled him to get "300% more use out of the bandwidth we already had."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.