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NEWSLETTER - COPING WITH THE REQUIREMENTS OF BRANCH OFFICES AND MOBILE USERS

A recent survey by Forrester research looked at the problems caused by the increasing fragmentation of organisations. There are three elements to this problem:

1. Companies are becoming increasingly distributed - they must support a large number of branch locations, outsourcing relationships and employees that are no longer in the traditional headquarters location
2. Users are becoming increasingly mobile - On top of more remote locations, users are also becoming more mobile - relying on Broadband wireless technologies to stay connected and productive
3. Applications are becoming increasingly complex - IT must support all of these locations and users with a very broad mix of applications. Added to this, new application types like software-as-a-service (SaaS) are making IT departments recalibrate support mechanisms

All this leads to poor performance that users will no longer tolerate. Today’s mobile worker expects access to any application with the same performance characteristics as if they were in head office.

 

However, many companies are now successfully meeting this need by deploying WAN optimisation solutions that are specifically tuned for a mobile environment. Mobile WAN optimisation provides the acceleration needed to ensure consistent performance, room for new applications and the ability to ensure end user productivity at all times.

 

The benefits of WAN optimisation for branch offices and mobile users

 

WAN optimisation aids users connecting to the network and accessing information, regardless of the access network from which they originate. In addition to simply empowering the mobility transition in the organisation, WAN optimisation solutions can guarantee a continuity of experience inside and outside the organisation. Specifically, mobile WAN optimisation helps tackle the major issues facing IT departments:

• Consistent performance for all applications - WAN optimisation not only improves end-to-end application performance, but it also smoothes out performance problems - providing a consistent end user experience regardless of location
• Room for deploying new business applications - For many companies, the mobile WAN is simply too latent or too congested to support innovative new line-of-business applications. WAN optimisation provides the means for decreasing overall WAN utilisation and freeing up considerable bandwidth
• Improved availability and disaster preparedness - WAN optimisation solutions are also critical in providing the data acceleration needed for backup and replication software. This ensures workforce continuity and decreases end user downtime, while they are brought back to a productive state, should something go awry

Wide-area Data Services (WDS)

 

Using WDS, IT departments can provide LAN-like access to data and applications anywhere throughout the enterprise network, enabling real-time collaboration for users in branch offices and mobile workers all over the world.

 

WDS encompasses several different product categories. Whether an organisation is seeking to make the most of its existing investment in WAN bandwidth by reducing traffic, or aims to accelerate the performance of its global applications by addressing latency and chatty protocols, the optimal solution addresses all aspects of the problem at once.

 

WDS is the superset of several existing categories:

• Application acceleration
• WAN optimisation
• Wide area file services (WAFS)
• QoS and traffic shaping
• Web caching

Unlike these individual approaches that only address a single cause of poor application performance across the WAN, a complete WDS solution enables the benefits of all of these approaches within a single, unified architecture.

 

Using WDS, enterprises can improve application performance across the network typically by 5 to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, and can simultaneously reduce WAN bandwidth utilisation by 65 to 95%.

 

These dramatic results allow businesses to take advantage of their networks, infrastructure and applications in ways that they had never imagined possible.

 

Data streamlining

 

Riverbed Steelhead appliances remove repetitive traffic from a WAN through patent-pending Data Streamlining algorithms. Data Streamlining stores WAN traffic on disk in a proprietary, application-independent form that can be reused by any application, any file or any user that sends or receives the same data.

 

Whether a client requests a file that has been renamed, e-mails an attachment or uses another application like FTP or a Web-based application, any traffic that is generated that has been across the network before will not be re-transmitted.

 

Instead, only a small reference to the data is sent to the Riverbed Steelhead appliance on the opposite side of the network. Riverbed's references are 16 bytes in length, yet can represent megabytes of data, which results in high levels of WAN bandwidth optimisation.

 

Riverbed delivers more than just WAN optimisation

 

Unlike WAN optimisation products, Riverbed Steelhead appliances deliver much more than reduced network traffic. Riverbed not only provides the best WAN optimisation available today, but also improves the throughput of your applications - because it's more than limited network bandwidth that slows down your applications.

 

Most vendors focused on WAN bandwidth optimisation do not offer true application acceleration, which are different and distinct challenges. Riverbed leads the pack on both.

 

By deploying Steelhead appliances and software, enterprises can accelerate application performance from 5 to 50 times - and in some cases up to 100 times - as well as reduce bandwidth. Steelhead appliances and software can deliver more responsive applications, successful consolidation of distributed IT infrastructure and enable expedited network-based backup and replication.

 

The complete Steelhead product family optimises traffic in both directions, transparent to applications and requires no reconfiguration to client and server software. All Steelhead products are designed for easy integration into an existing network, with no changes to routers or servers and complete compatibility with existing QoS and VoIP implementations.

 

To find out more how Riverbed Steelhead appliances can help you cope with requirements of branch offices and mobile users, please contact us on 01928 809000.

 

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