How do YOU use WAN optimization?
WAN optimization has become one of the “hot” technolgies within the networking—and broader IT—communities over the last 24 months. Market sizing (Gartner and others note it will be +/- $1B USD very shortly) reflects the rapid adoption of this technology.
Much of this fast adoption is due to the fact that it: 1) Addresses a very real set of problems (more on this shortly), 2) Has a very clear set of ROI calculations and/or problem resolutions (e.g. measurable application response times), and 3) Covers a range of IT challenges and sectors (branch server consolidation, application performance over WAN, bandwidth costs, data storage in branch).
So here’s my question to our blog readers: do YOU use WAN optimization today? If so, exactly WHAT do you use it for? How do you measure success on your investment? Hard #‘s or soft ones?
I’ll throw out the first example: a large phone service provider/retailer started deploying WAAS earlier this year in their data center and retail branches across North America. They have recently found they saved 3.2 Tb (yes, that’s TERAbits) of WAN traffic and related expense within a one month period. While consolidating branch infrastructure and reducing TCO from that.
Would be keen to hear your experience with your WAN optimization deployment…
Posted by Mark Weiner at 11:54AM PST
Kevin Sep 23, 2007
You are right a real need is there. We do development as well as doing QA testing on three continents. We were pushing data everywhere while trying to keep our WAN costs down. Finally we reached the breaking point. Our software syncs were taking 24 hours plus. We introduced Cisco’s WAN compression just this week and we went from 24 hours down to about 15. This next quarter we will be introducing DataDomain’s appliance to the mix and we are expecting to have the syncs under control.
One of our biggest needs is to get customer’s data in house to do support or testing against. We end up sending 500GB or 1TB USB drives to the customer. The customers have complained about how slow it is to copy data to the USB drive or they are worried about shipping customer data. I would like to see a device that we put on the edge of our network that did WAN compression and depulication and had a small device that we could send to the customer. We could set up a secure tunnel back to our company and they could copy data to the small device whenever we needed a transfer.
Thank you for the blog!