Seven ways to boost application performance

* Network managers and industry experts share some tips, tricks and technologies that help amp up apps

Seven ways to boost application performance

By Denise Dubie

When it comes to boosting application performance, it's about a lot more than just the bandwidth.

"Our network is scattered across the country with 82 field offices and 10 regional locations. Our field offices don't have local servers, and they had pretty slow lines," says Chris Finucane, CTO for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General in Washington, D.C. "We optimized the network and upgraded all our links to T-1 lines, and the field offices didn't notice a huge difference. That's when we realized bandwidth can't be everything and we needed to investigate other means to improve application performance."

Finucane's challenge is not unique, according to industry watchers who say today's increasingly complex applications simply aren't designed to run smoothly across large distributed networks that support branch, remote and mobile workers. That has network executives scrambling to invest in new technologies - such as application acceleration and WAN optimization tools - and others working with system administrators and application developers to tweak internal servers and fine-tune application code. We spoke with a handful of network professionals and industry analysts to get their advice on how to boost application performance across a network.

To read about the seven ways to boost app performance, please click here.

Senior Writer Denise Dubie covers network and systems management for Network World.

Copyright © 2006 IDG Communications, Inc.

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