Ensuring the timely, secure and reliable delivery of important applications and services over the WAN requires the deployment of tools to overcome a series of significant limitations in existing WANs. As the market for these tools has evolved, several single-function devices have emerged that offer a range of services. Financial services IT departments have recognized, however, the impracticality of deploying multiple discrete devices and have instead sought solutions that integrate these capabilities into a single platform.

For application performance across the WAN to improve, the WAN must behave more like a LAN. The technologies delivered by best-in-class integrated application acceleration solutions include compression and caching, acceleration, integrated QoS, application control, and an integrated configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting management application. Along with broad application support, this integrated approach allows IT to successfully provide LAN-quality application delivery across distributed enterprises.

Increasing WAN Capacity

The classic option for increasing the size of the WAN link is to upgrade the capacity of that constrained link. However, this option can be prohibitively expensive or entirely unavailable. Compression and caching offer a far more cost effective and timely solution to gain instant WAN capacity on the existing network.

Speeding Transmissions

To speed transmissions across the broadest range of business applications, application acceleration platforms need to overcome the impact of latency. To overcome delays caused by latency, an application acceleration platform requires both TCP acceleration and application-specific acceleration. Several TCP acceleration techniques can be implemented to benefit applications based on either short-lived or long-lived TCP connections. These techniques include:

• ‑Reducing round trip time (RTT) from TCP connection setup

• ‑Terminating the TCP connection local to the sender and using an efficient transport protocol between acceleration devices themselves

• ‑Use of recovery packets to allow reconstruction of lost packets

• ‑Pipelining data blocks and web objects to acceleration Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft File Services, and web-based applications

Quality of Service (QOS)

Since speeds between the LAN and the WAN differ widely, no amount of compression or acceleration will solve all problems. Contention for WAN capacity is a very real problem that must be addressed with an effective QoS and bandwidth allocation model that enforces business priorities. In many circumstances the WAN optimization and application acceleration platform is the best point in the network to perform QoS and bandwidth allocation.

Using Multiple WAN Links

Enterprises increasingly seek to take advantage of hybrid public/private WAN transports, while ensuring that key performance criteria will still be met. To make effective use of both paths, IT needs to apply business policies to each link and monitor their performance. A comprehensive application acceleration solution should enable IT to define which applications traverse which link and under what conditions.

Complete Monitoring

Defining policies for optimizing traffic flows over the WAN requires that IT understand the actual traffic flows. Monitoring tools that provide centralized, role-based management of distributed applications and networks are essential to effective application delivery. At a minimum, monitoring tools should provide visibility into such aspects as packet size distribution, error rates, throughput statistics, and TCP and application acceleration data.

In conclusion, to support the new initiatives enabled by Service Oriented Architecture, Software as a Service, Web 2.0, and other new application technologies, WANs must have the reliability and speed of LANs. This can be accomplished by deploying a number of tools, but to do so cost effectively requires the deployment of integrated networking tools that provide multiple services in a single device. These application acceleration devices are deployed in your existing network, elevating performance and availability, while protecting your existing investments.

Doron Abrahami is Senior Marketing Manager - Global Banking and Financial Services at Juniper Networks,
201-913-9975; email: dabrahami@juniper.net;
web: www.juniper.net.