Jim participated in a recent Network World online chat on the topic of application performance management and WAN acceleration. The way these chats work is that for an hour Network World readers type in questions and Jim types his response. All of this occurs live. Since Jim is not the world’s fastest typist he did not provide the most in depth answers to some of the questions. As a result, we are going to use the next several newsletters to expand on the answers to the questions that were raised by the Network World community.

Most of the questions concerned the vendors of application performance management and WAN acceleration solutions. For example, one participant asked Jim to identify what questions they should be asking vendors when evaluating products. We believe that the first step when evaluating an optimization solution is to identify what problem the user is trying to solve and that the problem should be narrowly defined. One options is that they may be concerned about running CIFS (Common Internet File System) traffic over a WAN once they have consolidated the branch office servers into a centralized data center. Alternatively, they may be concerned about backing up large databases as part of their business continuity strategy.

Another option is that the problem the IT organization is trying to solve is broadly defined. For example, the IT organization might have an immediate concern about supporting CIFS traffic over the WAN. However, in addition they might also be concerned that in the near term they have to also support database replication as well as delay sensitive traffic such as VoIP or videoconferencing.

Once the IT organization has identified the problem or problems it is trying to solve, it can develop very focused questions to ask the vendors. That follows because the optimization techniques that are appropriate for improving the performance of one category of traffic (i.e., CIFS traffic) are not necessarily appropriate for supporting a different category of traffic; i.e., delay sensitive traffic such as VoIP or videoconferencing. We'll discuss this further in the next couple of newsletters,

In the mean time, we would like to hear from you. What has been your experience when dealing with the suppliers of application performance management and WAN acceleration solutions? Have they been straight-forward with their answers or more allusive?

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.