* Does it make sense to combine acceleration with optimization in one box?
As a reporter, a primary part of my job is to ask questions. Luckily there are several industry organizations, enterprise network managers and vendors willing to provide their takes on the tough questions, which often don’t always have one clear-cut answer.
For instance, take last week’s Network Optimization newsletter in which I asked if application acceleration should be integrated into network equipment, such as routers. Cisco’s recent news around adding its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) technology to a blade for the company’s integrated service routers inspired the query.
Mark Fabbi, a vice president at research firm Gartner, responded to my question with a paper he penned last month with fellow analyst Joe Skorupa. The two put together the paper following Gartner’s Symposium show in response to a slew of questions around this market. And one question conference attendees posed to the analysts dealt precisely with integrating acceleration and optimization technologies in network equipment.
Here is what the analysts had to say about that and several other pressing questions.
To start, Fabbi and Skorupa write that because a router’s purpose varies widely from acceleration and optimization technologies it doesn’t necessarily make sense to integrate those capabilities into the equipment. With managed services, the customer doesn’t own the equipment thus making it difficult to integrate the needed capabilities into the gear. Because the needs of enterprise organizations varies widely, the features in WAN optimizations controllers (WOCs) and application delivery controllers (ADCs) need to fit the needs of the business buying the technology. Gartner says while it may seem natural to embed functions such as TCP optimization into the router operating system, vendors haven’t stepped up to modify the TCP stack. Gartner concludes for the near future that an integrated approach might actually complicate the network more and not deliver the desired results.
“Routers only examine a small portion of the beginning of the packet to make their decisions. [WAN optimization controllers] need to process the entire payload and [application delivery controllers] must act as a full proxy before parsing and examining the full message,” the report “Application Acceleration: Hot Topics from Symposium” reads. “Although it is possible to build a blade to go into a router or switch, you need to consider any pros and cons involved in this approach.”
