What is WAN acceleration and how does it work?

WAN acceleration is a hot topic these days. WAN acceleration is about improving the performance of business critical applications that run over wide area networks. WAN acceleration technology can improve most company’s application response times, particularly when network latency is high and WAN bandwidth is limited. WAN acceleration devices use techniques that change the packet header data so that data it can be transferred more efficiently.  These techniques include compression, de-duplication, and other application specific algorythms.

WAN acceleration technology offers these key advantages:

It eliminates redundant data transmission (a huge advantage), because during data replication much of the replicated data remains unchanged.

It also simplifies IT management by using the same support contract and providing transparency of services Dedicated hardware and software-Invest in a solution that uses dedicated hardware and software to perform WAN acceleration without affecting voice, data, and security tasks. This feature is important because it allows IT organizations to deploy WAN acceleration without making any changes to user PCs, network infrastructure, or applications.

A true transparent solution should offer all of the following capabilities:

1. Application transparency - This capability makes deployment fast and easy because no initial and ongoing changes are needed for end-user PCs and applications
2. Interception transparency -This capability allows fast and easy deployment because neither the client nor the server is aware of the existence of the WAN acceleration devices in the path
3. Preservation of industry-standard NetFlow policy
4. Preservation of router access control lists (ACLs)
5. Preservation of firewall policies
6. Preservation of quality of service (QoS) -Without IP header transparency, QoS and associated features may need to be reconfigured if the packet header information is overwritten
7. Preservation of Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR) -NBAR is a protocol discovery and classification technique that relies on visibility to application data.

WAN acceleration is a critical piece of the IT puzzle for delivering applications to the branch office and should be an integral part of the overall application delivery infrastructure. Consequently, there is a large and growing market for WAN acceleration appliances, with business networks wanting to lower latency, speed up applications and to better manage quality of service (QoS) for critical and recreational applications, and increase performance.

WAN acceleration is a critical enabler for networks aiming to achieve higher application throughput and productivity. In the past, the myth that "ordering more bandwidth will solve my problems" was the general response when a business was facing slow application performance across their corporate WAN. This response was due in part because there were limited options for IT staff to try and improve application performance without increasing Network bandwidth.

Application performance issues for remote users, data center consolidation, the growing number of distributed branch offices, and the desire to avoid costly WAN bandwidth upgrades are just a few of the business drivers increasing demand for WAN acceleration solutions.