* Organizations willing to spend to improve app performance to branch offices
A recent survey of about 350 IT professionals sponsored by Silver Peak Systems shows that enterprise companies are willing to invest money in technology to improve and ensure application performance to branch office locations.
The survey, conducted in conjunction with InfoWorld magazine, found that more than 96% of IT organizations surveyed are experiencing one or more major challenges with applications in branch offices. And 94% have taken steps to address the problems. The steps used to alleviate poor performance reported by the respondents were upgrading network equipment for some 69% and upgrading WAN bandwidth for 55%.
According to the survey, network managers historically would spend more on adding network bandwidth to achieve application performance goals. But the results show that more and more network managers are looking to application acceleration and WAN optimization technologies to help them improve application performance on WAN connections. Also, the network managers don’t have to justify the spending with detailed return on investment (ROI) justifications to purchase the wares.
“What we found is that the performance pain enterprises are experiencing when delivering applications to branch offices is big enough that less than 1 in 4 had to even prepare an ROI cost justification for their purchases of equipment to address performance problems,” says Craig Stouffer, vice president for worldwide marketing at Silver Peak Systems.
Silver Peak’s Network Memory uses technology that the company calls local instance networking. The technology includes an appliance loaded with software that watches traffic and recognizes patterns in packets, bytes and application traffic. The appliances are installed at either end of a WAN link, for example, in a corporate data center and at distributed branch offices. When the data center appliance sees a pattern of bytes that is already sent to a branch office location, it will only send a reference across the WAN. The reference will instruct the branch office box to use all of parts of the content it has on site and send it along to the requesting end user.
According to Silver Peak, the results showed that “most of the justifications organizations are making are less-quantifiable measures like ‘improved application availability’ and ‘improved user productivity.’ “
