* A look at some of the incentives prompting IT executives to invest in WAN optimization technology
The opportunity to save money while improving performance is driving scores of IT executives to look into WAN optimization technologies. Oftentimes it’s what enterprises don’t have to buy – another server or more bandwidth, for example – that seals a deal.
I took a look at some recent announcements from players in the WAN optimization market to get a feel for what is important to today’s IT shoppers.
Atlanta Technology, for example, chose to go with NX appliances from Silver Peak Systems to strengthen the performance of its centrally hosted application servers and improve business continuity through faster data backup and disaster recovery.
“Our requirements for WAN acceleration were precise – we wanted to centralize the IT infrastructure without spending the Earth on bandwidth,” said Mike Kelson, technical director at Atlanta Technologies, an application service provider in England specializing in converged voice and data applications.
For law firm Reed Smith, the decision to go with Packeteer technology supports an ongoing data center consolidation project. The firm is deploying the vendor’s PacketShapers to classify, monitor and prioritize applications running across the WAN. PacketShapers also will enable the firm to converge its data, voice and future video applications on its existing network without requiring WAN link upgrades. Lastly, the Packeteer gear will let Reed Smith more quickly respond to changes in traffic conditions to preserve performance of key applications, such as Citrix and voice traffic.
“By operating out of the centralized data center, the PacketShapers have a unique vantage point to discover and react to traffic we didn’t realize was running over our network,” said Karl Greenwood, network analyst with Reed Smith.
To get a feel for its customers’ sentiments, Riverbed Technology recently surveyed 500 users of its technology and identified common purchasing motivations. Nearly 80% of respondents bought Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to accelerate applications. The ability to reduce bandwidth costs, consolidate IT, and facilitate disaster recovery processes also ranked highly. More than 70% of respondents selected IT consolidation as either a primary or secondary motivation for purchasing, while 60% named disaster recovery as a primary or secondary motivation.
Riverbed found customers are accelerating a broad range of applications; the 10 most common are Windows File Sharing, Microsoft Exchange, Web-based applications (such as SharePoint), Microsoft SQL applications, custom applications, client/server business applications (such as Oracle and SAP), FTP, backup/replication (such as SnapMirror and DoubleTake), thin client, CAD and document management applications.
How do these motivations compare to your own? What’s driving your WAN optimization project? As always, I welcome any and all feedback.
