* Forrester Research helps companies get started in the search for the right WAN optimization solution
Confused by a sea of vendors offering WAN optimization gear? Not sure what you need? Or which vendor is the best fit? You’re not alone.
The market for WAN optimization technology is growing quickly as companies grapple with the issue of making centralized applications available to distributed offices and remote employees in a timely fashion. There are a slew of vendors available to help, each with slightly different product offerings that combine caching, protocol optimization, compression and traffic management techniques. Finding the right platform for an enterprise can be challenging, particularly as IT managers try to weigh current and future application scenarios.
Forrester Research recently published a report that provides answers to 10 of the most common questions the firm gets from clients in need of help improving application performance over the WAN. For example, the report explains how WAN optimization works, and what improvement gains enterprises can expect. It also identifies the top vendors in the market and what differentiates each one.
Forrester analysts Robert Whiteley, Simon Yates and Rachel Batiancila put together the report — titled “WAN Optimization: What You Really Need To Know” — to address the fact that “the different optimization techniques are confusing; the landscape is too crowded and common sense is often abandoned during deployments.”
To purchase the full report, check out Forrester’s Web site.
Meanwhile, here are a few observations that stood out to me:
* The more redundant the data, the more dramatic the impact. “WAN optimization has the highest impact on applications that have a lot of redundant data because they can be easily accelerated using caching, compression, and protocol-specific techniques,” according to the Forrester report. Enterprises could expect to achieve 50x improvements in the performance of Web-based applications such as Microsoft SharePoint and SAP, the firm says. For client/server and server-based applications, such as Citrix, a 15x to 20x improvement is a more reasonable expectation since these applications are “less amenable to caching and compression.”
* Bandwidth savings add up. There are plenty of reasons to consider WAN optimization. For example, users are more productive when applications are delivered in a timely manner, and disaster recovery efforts can be streamlined when remote backups are performed more quickly. But when it comes to dollars and cents, the easiest benefit to quantify is bandwidth savings. WAN optimization can decrease link utilization from 80% to 40% by using caching and compression, which can allow a company to prolong a major WAN bandwidth upgrade, according to Forrester. “We’ve seen clients with highly latent international links see a return on investment (ROI) as short as three months. If you have a regional or nationwide network, you can expect a tamer 12- to 18-month ROI,” the report states.
* Do your homework. Before trying to deploy WAN optimization technology, it’s important to understand your application topology, Forrester says. Some of the steps enterprises should take in advance include figuring out what applications traverse the WAN and which sites access those applications; digging to find the root cause of any application performance issues, such as a faulty database or maxed-out server; and designing and implementing a testing plan to analyze traffic patterns and measure potential gains from different optimization techniques.
