Five times, 10 times, 20 times or more: The performance benefits from application acceleration are real — provided you understand what the technology can and can’t do for your network. Here are best practices for deploying application-acceleration devices.

1. Define your goals

There’s no one way to make an application go faster. For some users, reducing WAN bandwidth consumption and cutting monthly circuit costs may be the key goals. For others, the key goal will be speeding up bulk-data transfer. For others, improving the response time of interactive applications is most important.

Deciding where to deploy application acceleration also is a consideration. Pairs of acceleration devices work in the data center, deployed on both ends of a WAN link; increasingly, they also are deployed as client software on telecommuters’ or road warriors’ machines. Identifying the biggest bottlenecks in your network will help you decide which parts of your network can benefit most.

It’s also worth considering whether application acceleration can complement other enterprise IT initiatives. For example, many organizations have server-consolidation plans underway and are moving remote servers into centralized data centers. Symmetrical WAN-link application-acceleration devices can reduce response time and WAN bandwidth use, giving remote users LAN-like performance. In a similar vein, application acceleration may help enterprise VoIP or video rollouts by prioritizing key flows and keeping latency and jitter low.