In the crowded market for WAN optimization products, IT buyers such as Cary Dahl must consider closely exactly the technologies that would best complement existing tools, network design and business needs.

As IT manager at Ivey, a Seattle-based visual imaging solutions provider, Dahl earlier this year began a search for technology to improve performance across distributed offices. Ivey wanted to maximize the existing hardware in place by sharing technologies across multiple locations, while still keeping end-user and customer experience above par.

"We tend to do a mixture of bandwidth to our various locations, but with one of our higher priorities being customer experience, I realized we needed to increase the technologies we used to make the most of bandwidth we had," Dahl says.

The company, which provides retail companies such Nike, Adidas and Starbucks with visual imaging campaigns, distributes technologies across manufacturing operations in Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles, as well as sales offices in Atlanta, Dallas and Memphis. For instance, screen printing happens in California, and photography technologies and services are put to work in Portland. With Gigabytes of data in the form of image files crossing the WAN and technologies such as Microsoft CIFS and FTP in use, Ivey was "at the mercy of our WAN," Dahl says.

Facing bandwidth upgrades that were estimated to potentially cost $100,000 per year in telco and hardware upgrades, Dahl performed a bake-off of products from F5 Networks, Packeteer, Riverbed and Silver Peak Systems.

"Honestly, all of the products offered features on par with each other, for instance, from a caching standpoint, they all did similarly well," Dahl explains. "But we needed something that did more than optimize traffic between the data center and specific sites. We needed to be able to share resources across multiple sites."

Silver Peak won Dahl's bake off and he installed a handful of appliances to get results. Silver Peak's technology uses a method of traffic pattern recognition and local data caching to accelerate WAN traffic. Silver Peak boxes need to be deployed in a corporate data center and at each remote site. Boxes at each site communicate with the central device. Silver Peak's NX line of appliances run software that can accelerate the performance of WAN traffic by caching the bit patterns of WAN traffic and then caching those patterns in local storage. When the appliance recognizes patterns it already has "memorized" it delivers the bit patterns locally, freeing up WAN pipes for other streams of traffic.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.