* Design application to run well over the WAN
Over the last couple of years we have written extensively about what is commonly called network and application optimization. This refers to a wide range of techniques – compression, caching, forward error correction, spoofing, look-ahead – that companies implement to help applications run better. This newsletter and the next are going to suggest a different approach to improving application performance. Instead of implementing an application that runs poorly over the WAN and which then requires IT organizations to implement network and application optimization techniques, how about writing applications that run well over the WAN?
To put this suggestion in context, it is important to realize that collectively Jim and Steve have roughly 50 years of IT experience. Actually it is significantly more than 50 years of experience, but we are happy to let it go at just 50. It continues to amaze us that in so many cases the fundamental problems facing IT organizations are the same today as they were decades ago. Sure, the technologies change (anybody remember Fortran or Cobol?), but in many cases the fundamental problems do not.
A great example of that phenomenon is that for as long as we can remember applications were developed over some form of high-speed, low-latency LAN. These applications were then deployed over a relatively low-speed, high-latency WAN and in many instances they did not perform well.
In some cases this means that an application that a company spent millions of dollars to either develop or acquire is not usable. In other cases, the company spends significant additional resources trying to implement some workaround to improve the performance of the application to where it is at least tolerable.
We have to ask the question: How long will senior IT management continue to take this approach?
Our position is that IT organizations that accept the relatively minor overhead and cost associated with using WAN emulation during application development will in many cases experience huge benefits in terms of deploying applications that actually run well over the WAN. We’ll discuss this more in the next issue, but in the meantime, if you want to read more about WAN emulation, you can download the 2008 Application Delivery Handbook. It is available for no cost here.
