Chapter 1: Introduction to Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS)

IT organizations struggle with two opposing challenges: to provide high levels of application performance for an increasingly distributed workforce and to consolidate costly infrastructure to streamline management, improve data protection, and contain costs. Separating the growing remote workforce from the location that IT desires to deploy infrastructure is the wide-area network (WAN), which introduces significant delay, packet loss, congestion, and bandwidth limitations, impeding a users’ abilities to interact with applications and the data they need in a high-performance manner conducive to productivity. These opposing challenges place IT organizations in a difficult position as they must make tradeoffs between performance and cost, as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1
Tradeoffs Between Performance and Cost

Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is a solution designed to bridge the divide between application performance and infrastructure consolidation in WAN environments. Leveraging appliances, router modules, or software deployed at both ends of a WAN connection and employing robust optimizations at multiple layers, Cisco WAAS is able to ensure high-performance access for remote workers who access distant application infrastructure and information, including file services, e-mail, the Web, intranet and portal applications, and data protection. By mitigating the performance-limiting factors of the WAN, Cisco WAAS not only improves performance, but also positions IT organizations to better consolidate distributed infrastructure to better control costs and ensure a stronger position toward data protection and compliance. Coupled with providing performance-improving techniques to enable consolidation of branch office infrastructure into the data center, Cisco WAAS provides an extensive platform for branch office virtualization, enabling IT organizations to deploy or retain applications and services in the branch office in a more cost-effective manner.

Figure 1-2 shows the deployment architecture for the Cisco WAAS solution.

Figure 1-2
Cisco WAAS Solution Architecture

The purpose of this book is to discuss the Cisco WAAS solution in depth, including a thorough examination of how to design and deploy Cisco WAAS in today’s challenging enterprise networks. This chapter provides an introduction to the performance barriers that are created by the WAN and a technical introduction to Cisco WAAS and its capabilities. This chapter also examines the software architecture of Cisco WAAS and outlines how each of the fundamental optimization components overcomes those application performance barriers. Additionally, this chapter examines the virtualization capabilities provided by Cisco WAAS to enable branch infrastructure consolidation while allowing applications that must be deployed in the branch office to remain deployed in the branch office.