* How valuable to organizations is WAN emulation technology
Today, we’re continuing our look at WAN emulation for use in helping organizations write applications that run well over the WAN. Last time, we introduced two IT professionals (The Technology Manager and The Performance Engineer) whom we interviewed about their use of WAN emulation and today we introduce The Consultant. They all spoke about the different ways they’re using WAN emulation and the technology’s value to their respective organizations.
The Technology Manager said that as part of his company’s focus on ensuring that applications will run well over the WAN, they now use a WAN emulation tool during application development. He added that they also used this tool to plan for the consolidation of servers out of their branch offices and into a set of centralized data centers. In particular, they used the WAN emulation tool to choose locations for their data centers that would result in acceptable application performance. In a similar fashion, The Consultant stated that they used a WAN emulation tool as part of the process that they went through to consolidate data centers. He said that the quantitative data produced by the tool was very helpful because the overall process of consolidating data centers was “just a tad political” and the tool helped to quantify how the performance of the company’s key applications would change based on where the data centers were located.
According to The Consultant: “One of the real values of using a WAN emulation tool is that it helps to set user expectations in advance of deploying the application.” For example, his organization often uses WAN emulation during application development to predict application performance. They also get the end user organizations involved during the application development phase so that these groups can look at the results produced by the WAN emulation tool and sign off (or not) on the acceptability of the performance. He added that the application development teams do not have to use WAN emulation during application development. However, he pointed out that his company recently deployed a high visibility application without using WAN emulation and that the application performance was miserable.
That failure has made the application development teams notably more receptive to using a WAN emulation tool.
Next time, we’ll discuss the advice these three IT professionals gave us relative to selecting a WAN emulation tool. In the mean time, if you want to read more about WAN emulation, you can download the 2008 Application Delivery Handbook, available at no cost from Webtorials.
