Winding up the WAN

WAN optimization technologies are promoted as a solution for many of the challenges faced by regional enterprises, but the technology is not without its issues.

The advance of the cloud; the growing requirement for more sophisticated file sharing capabilities; bandwidth-hungry applications; the virtualisation of physical servers; and the overspill of business-critical traffic into the WAN: everything points to the continued explosion in demand for network optimisation technology. And where enterprises lack the expertise in their IT department, or are determined to keep a tight rein on cost, they will be looking to their outsourcing partners to fulfil that demand on their behalf.

Analysts are still crunching the numbers for 2009, but even in the teeth of recession the market had a healthy foundation to build on last year. In 2008, WAN optimisation routers and appliances generated more than $1 billion globally for the first time, according to Infonetics Research. The same firm says the market will grow a further 50% by 2013.

Nigel Hawthorn, EMEA vice president at one of the market leaders, Blue Coat Systems, said that network managers are already benefiting from crucial elements of optimisation technology that have emerged recently, and that enterprises in the Middle East – particularly those with distributed infrastructures – are primed to take advantage of the improved performance of their networks.

“WAN optimisation has evolved fairly quickly; a year or two ago, this technology was focused purely on internal shared files, such as Microsoft Office files on CIFS servers, or Exchange server files using MAPI,” he said.

“Today, network managers are demanding – and vendors are delivering – WAN optimisation for video streaming, externally-hosted Software as a Service [SaaS] files and other applications and protocols. The benefits to network managers are that more applications can be optimised, and therefore the technology is delivering greater benefits to the organisation.”

Hawthorn reports rising adoption rates for WAN optimisation in government departments, education and large distributed enterprises in the region.

“It provides benefits for anyone who has multiple offices, and especially if their main data is outside the Middle East,” he adds. “Middle Eastern offices of US or European organisations have seen large improvements in response time and WAN bandwidth usage.”

Departmental and branch-reliant businesses are in the front line of adoption, suggests Tarek Abbas, senior systems engineering manager for the enterprise at another major optimised appliance vendor, Juniper Networks.

“Middle Eastern enterprises are growing rapidly and increasingly have a variety of locations that range in size, applications and link-types,” he said. “These types of business need a wide range of WAN optimisation and application acceleration platforms.

“Essentially, IT needs an architecture that can scale from small branch offices to regional deployments to centralised hub locations. Such customers include banking, government sectors and private business. Basically, any customer with a remote branch can benefit from this technology.”

But as with any rapidly evolving technology, adopters can encounter implementation challenges – not least with the arrival of yet another piece of kit in the branch or department which, multiplied across a WAN, represents a potential logistical headache for the hard-pressed network manager.Vendors claim to be making the transition to optimised networks as smooth as possible by integrating the functionality into their existing routers and bringing them under the umbrella of their centralised management platforms. But what about those network managers who don’t have access to that scale of established infrastructure?

Guru Prasad, general manager for networking and security at one of the region’s specialist communications distributors, FVC, said that the self-learning methodologies embedded in many optimised products will alleviate many implementation and integration pains. But network managers will still often need to perform a degree of customisation. Outsourcing to a managed service provider is one alternative.

“Obviously, multi-branch enterprises facing application performance issues and customers with disaster recovery centres have deployed optimisation technologies to help them improve application performance,” he said.

“There is a big opportunity for managed service providers to take advantage of this growing market. In addition, customers deploying Sharepoint in branch offices, CAD applications across the WAN, document management systems or users of heavy file systems across branch offices should definitely be looking at optimisation.”

Prasad also suggests that customers who use video conferencing or VoIP – two applications that are placing a relentless strain on the network - across their WAN should use optimisation to enhance the quality of service.

“There will be a greater rise in the amount of voice and video streaming, which will place additional load on the network with latency-sensitive traffic,” agreed Steve Turner, optimisation consultant at Intergence Systems Middle East.

“More workers will be looking to connect to the corporate network regardless of location, and will expect a similar level of performance. And virtualisation will be key, with many companies employing third-party cloud-based services to deliver their hosted applications offsite, rather than in-house. Greater granularity in traffic monitoring will also be key to ensure that network managers track performance and identify problem areas and users before the network is congested to the point of collapse.”

Another layer of complexity is added to optimisation by certain real time applications – and this could make optimisation a redundant choice in some instances. Turner offers Citrix as an example: a highly optimised protocol that requires compression and encryption to be disabled on the server in order to be optimised by the WAN accelerator! The situation is further complicated where all network traffic is encrypted.

“If the WAN accelerator can’t distinguish the different application flows then it won’t be able to optimise the traffic,” he said. “There is always scope for optimisation, but this will have to occur before the traffic is encrypted and sent across the WAN. It is important to have visibility into what is using the network before a solution can be applied to improve performance.”

However, Turner adds, some network optimisation solutions can integrate with encrypted WAN links, decrypting locally on the device, optimising it and then re-encrypting it to ensure security as well as acceleration.

“WAN acceleration can make small bandwidth WAN links behave like much larger ones without the great additional cost that comes with paying for more bandwidth,” he said.

Juniper’s Abbas agrees that application-acceleration is one of the main drivers of integrated network optimisation technology adoption.

“Several single-function devices have emerged that offer compression, caching, acceleration, bandwidth management and reporting,” he said. “IT has recognised, however, the impracticality of deploying multiple discrete devices and has instead sought solutions that integrate these capabilities into a single platform.“When designed properly, this integration provides better overall functionality, as each feature can tune itself based on dynamic feedback from each other.”

Turner explains that files can be transferred across the WAN at much greater speeds via intelligent compression, de-duplication and acceleration techniques. “Additionally, high-latency, high-bandwidth links can be used to their full potential for ‘chatty’ applications such as CIFS, FTP, MS Exchange and HTTP, which require a high number of round trips in order to transfer data and so are restricted by latency,” he added.

In these more complex scenarios, network managers without the specialist knowledge will need to be absolutely sure that they are not building a poorly configured system, and that they aren’t in danger of degrading network performance.

Other challenges include navigating vendor hype in a market overflowing with improvement claims, being able to identify the genuine benefits and ROI, understanding thoroughly the types of applications running across the network, choosing the right solution for the business – and integrating with existing network hardware.

Juniper’s Abbas said customers certainly need to look at the integration claims made by vendors: “Optimising branch deployments to minimise the management burden and lower the total cost of ownership is critical to every enterprise.”

Juniper makes the heady claim that its ISM200 Integrated Services module has rationalised the accelerated WAN delivery of applications like ERP, CRM, email and file services, using existing WAN resources and improving application response times to provide a ‘LAN-like’ experience for branch-office users when they access centralised applications.

Blue Coat’s Hawthorn offers some reassurance that even in more complex environments, WAN optimisation can be installed without the need for radical infrastructure changes. On the whole, the biggest challenge is deciding where to begin implementation.

“Some customers start by looking at the largest offices first, though often it is the smallest and furthest offices that receive the greatest benefit,” he said. “There is one thing to bear in mind: it’s important to look at the total cost of WAN optimisation delivery before starting – and get your vendor to price up all global offices, as some do not have a low entry-price for the smallest offices; and they will always recommend you start with the largest office first.”

Smaller businesses, at least, might prefer to ignore the hype around network optimisation. With their data usually stored internally in a single office, they are unlikely to have the network performance problems that WAN optimisation is designed to solve.

Hawthorn says the next target for optimisation vendors is the mobile user who, sitting in a hotel room with a laptop and ‘enjoying’ second-rate network performance – is hungry for the improved quality of service it can deliver.

Another enhancement to look out for is the simultaneous delivery of optimisation and security. “This will not only ensure that remote offices and travelling user are kept secure from web threats but will also allow optimisation decisions to be based on security policies,” said Hawthorn.

“If Facebook and Youtube are allowed, for example, we probably don’t want to use resources to accelerate them, so optimisation policies can be defined that are appropriate for the business.”