WAN acceleration gear grows up

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: OPTICAL NETWORKING
10/05/05

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* WAN acceleration products
* Links related to Optical Networking
* Featured reader resource
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This newsletter is sponsored by Sybase

It sounds so simple: if you collect enough business information,
you'll glean valuable insights that can drive both revenue
growth and competitive advantage. Along the way, however,
companies are discovering that managing the explosive growth of
online data can prove a formidable challenge. Here's how to
assess your data management style, and maximize your
opportunities to turn online data into business opportunity.
Click here for more on taming the data explosion.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=116848
_______________________________________________________________
HOW WILL YOU HANDLE YOUR GROWING NETWORK LOAD?

InfiniBand, EtherFabric and iWarp are all high-speed
interconnect technologies aimed at offloading network
connections from server CPUs. And the buzz on them is picking up
as users look for alternatives to 10G Ethernet to handle their
growing network loads. What questions should you ask about these
new technologies? For more, click here:
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=116102
_______________________________________________________________

Today's focus: WAN acceleration gear grows up

By Tim Greene

Businesses should expect to face a wide and confusing array of
choices when seeking the right WAN-acceleration gear to make
transaction times tolerable as they shift from branch office
servers to centralized server farms.

Centralization reduces the number of servers and so saves
capital and maintenance costs, and improves security. But it
also means more end users access data via the WAN - users who
will scream if performance degrades as a result.

Availl, Cisco and Brocade offer products tuned to speed up
specific types of WAN traffic - wide-area file services or WAFS
- which represent a large chunk of the new WAN traffic that
results when servers are centralized. But a throng of other
vendors says its more broadly focused gear is better suited to
real customer needs. All WAN traffic can benefit from
acceleration, they say, and not all WAN traffic is WAFS.

This more broadly focused equipment can boost the performance of
a range of network traffic, not just WAFS, although some vendors
are tuning their gear so it gives special treatment to WAFS, as
well. These WAN-acceleration vendors include Array Networks,
Converged Access, Expand, Juniper, Orbital Data, Packeteer,
Riverbed Technology, Silver Peak Systems, Swan Labs and others.

As an example of this tweaking for WAFS, Packeteer this week is
announcing a software download for its PacketShaper appliances
that can target priority treatment for Microsoft Windows Server
2003 R2, as well as Active Directory, Exchange and distributed
component object model traffic. Packeteer also is teaming with
Tacit Networks to provide a separate Tacit appliance that caches
data in branch offices as a way to speed WAN transactions.

A crowded field

The WAN acceleration field is crowded because vendors have the
opportunity to get a cut of the $5 billion spent this year on
branch office infrastructure, and that number will rise next
year, says Cindy Borovick, director of data center networks for
IDC.

If the devices can help data center consolidation by boosting
performance, they can pay for themselves over time, making them
attractive to corporations, she says. But the variety of vendors
and the varying mix of techniques they use mean customers have
to do their homework to find the product that is best for them.

All the gear in question have certain things in common. For
instance, they are generally deployed in pairs at either end of
WAN connections, prioritizing and altering traffic to make it
cross the links more efficiently.

Vendors are dealing with a common set of problems rooted in the
fact that WAN bandwidth is less than LAN bandwidth, making
response time slower for each traffic type as it waits its turn.
As applications compete for this bandwidth, those that are less
important to the business might disrupt more critical ones
unless something is done about it.

Competition for bandwidth is compounded by network delay in
cases where traffic crosses long distances and by the slowing
effects TCP has when it throttles back transmission rates to
make up for what it perceives as network congestion. The result
can be applications that perform so poorly that end users
complain, or worse, don't use the applications as they should
for best productivity.

To handle these problems, vendors have an array of technologies,
including compression, caching, prioritization, application
enhancement and TCP acceleration. Not every vendor uses all of
these and each might use a different mix. As a result,
acceleration devices from one vendor might provide more
improvement than devices from another even though they are
placed on the same link and try to speed performance for the
same traffic.

For the full story, please go to:
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical8187>

The top 5: Today's most-read stories

1. Nortel faces uphill battle
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical8188>
2. How to solve Windows system crashes in minutes
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical7626>
3. Cisco pushes new security software
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical8189>
4. Tech Update: High-speed TCP eases WAN congestion
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical8190>
5. Somebody's got to pick up the 'Net's tab
<http://www.networkworld.com/nloptical8191>

_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Tim Greene

Tim Greene is a senior editor at Network World, covering virtual
private networking gear, remote access, core switching and local
phone companies. You can reach him at <mailto:tgreene@nww.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Sybase

It sounds so simple: if you collect enough business information,
you'll glean valuable insights that can drive both revenue
growth and competitive advantage. Along the way, however,
companies are discovering that managing the explosive growth of
online data can prove a formidable challenge. Here's how to
assess your data management style, and maximize your
opportunities to turn online data into business opportunity.
Click here for more on taming the data explosion.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=116847
_______________________________________________________________
ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the Optical Networking newsletter:
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/optical/index.html
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE

IT PROS SHARE THEIR TALES OF MAKING ITIL WORK

Running an enterprise network is challenging. IT organizational
change can be even more so if managers don't balance efforts
proportionally across people, process and technology.
Implementing best practices frameworks such as Information
Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) can help, but they
introduce their own set of challenges. Click here for more:

<http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/092205-itil.html>
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