What is WAN Optimization ??

How to Optimize WAN
Networks play an important role in the businesses and if the network is slow so is the business. For improving the performance there are different techniques and products are on the rise such as route control products, content delivery networks, load balancing technology, multicasting and caching.

The other techniques and methods that are involved in improving the performance of the wide area network are CIFS proxy, HTTPS proxy, media multicasting, bandwidth management, web casting and WAFS.  Deployment of the wide area network optimization appliances at the data center and the branch sites boosts the network and distributed application performance with the minimum efforts.

Improving applications performance over the networks has become the ultimate goal of the organizations.  Varying network types and applications require different solutions.  WAN accelerators and WAFS optimize the data that travel over the longer distance.  Traffic over the wire is optimized through streaming, compression, prioritization, local and centralized caching and other methods.

Optimization Techniques
The optimization software and hardware use the following techniques to boost the performance of a network.

• Staging data on the local cache
• Compressing and prioritizing data
• Streamlining chatting protocols.

Vendors
The following vendors provide the WAN optimization products and appliances.

• Cisco
• Juniper
• Blue Coat
• F5 Networks
• Silver Peak
• River Bed
• InMage
• Peribit

Most of the products provided by these vendors are the hardware based and some are the combination of hardware and software.
Juniper offers the following Networks Application Acceleration Platforms.

• WX Platforms

This platform is used to increase the application performance, application and data prioritization, WAN capacity and this platform delivers compressed output that travels at the speed 64 Kbps to 155 Mbps.

• WXC Platforms

WXC Platforms holds the on-board hard drives that are used to store the repeated data and that ultimately increase the WAN capacity by 100 folds.  WXC Platforms support the disk capacity from 40 GB to 3 TB and WAN links from 128 Kbps to 155 Mbps.

• WX CMS

WX CMS platform is used to manage multiple WX platforms and WXC platforms from one central location.  There are easy monitoring and configuration tools in this platform.  The main feature of the WX CMS is the application performance, WAN utilization, bandwidth allocation and QOS.