* Centralized apps, growing branches require acceleration, optimization tools
As data center consolidation projects continue, the affect on employees at branch offices is top-of-mind for IT staffs. No longer are applications stored locally, with performance being only a mild concern. Now they are stored centrally and must be delivered consistently and predictably to remote workers.
Nearly 57% of organizations say their applications are consolidated at the data center (with another 2.47% heading in that direction), and only 8.64% have applications actually distributed at the branch. Nearly one third (32.1%) store some applications centrally and others at branch locations, according to Nemertes’ Building a Successful Virtual Workplace benchmark.
Given so many applications are stored centrally – and away from the branch office – the network performance becomes crucial to application performance. Who wants to be the IT guy or gal responsible for remote employees waiting 10 seconds between clicks on an ERP application?
By implementing network-optimization tools, IT and network staffs are delivering applications with acceptable, predictable performance – not to mention saving on circuit costs and boosting employee productivity.
Network-optimization tools have become a must-have in the list of products required to deliver data and applications to remote employees. This category of products improves performance of network capacity and application performance by adopting techniques such as data compression, latency reduction, caching, load balancing, and more. The broad product category includes bandwidth-optimization, route-optimization and application-acceleration – and the lines between these products and services are blurring.
Consolidation has been underway among providers in this space, and it’s going to continue for a while. This space is crowded with vendors and providers, including Allot, Avaya (through its RouteScience acquisition), Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix, Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Internap, Juniper, Packeteer, Riverbed, SilverPeak, and numerous others.
Bandwidth-optimization uses algorithms to compress traffic and reduce latency, which reduces the need to increase bandwidth. It also improves application performance.
Route-optimization determines the best route from point A to point B at any moment in time. The tools continually analyze response time on paths a packet could take. Individual packets within a single file transfer could take different routes to their destination, if the tools calculate performance is better on a given route. And, companies also use the products to cost-optimize their contracts. For example, if utilization on one circuit has reached its maximum, the route-optimization tool will know to send all traffic along an alternative path until the next month’s billing cycle starts.
Application-acceleration relies on algorithms to improve application performance over IP networks. Additionally, they assess which applications are using how much bandwidth and enforce administrator-created policies that identify how much bandwidth to designate for certain applications, block certain applications, or outline user-based restrictions.
Usage of the technology is increasing. Nearly 55% of companies that participated in Nemertes’ benchmark are using optimization technology, and another 11% are evaluating it. Only 33% of the participants are not using optimization
I expect companies will continue to rely even more heavily upon optimization technologies to help control performance and costs on increasingly complex, distributed networks. Without them, distributed enterprises won’t have the insight they need to managed their networks properly.
