Thread: Data Center Connectivity

In many organizations, a very small percentage of the total employees work in HO, while the remaining are ih the branch offices or out on the field. The cost of maintaining an IT infrastructure in so many branch offices to cater to these employees is extremely high, and not to mention complex as well. This is where centralizing the IT infrastructure and providing connectivity over WAN links can be a significant cost saver. But this has its own set of challenges.

The core issue of centralizing the IT infrastructure is that service delivery becomes a wide area issue when your employees move away from the HQ, and all your servers and storate move into the data center. On .the other hand, it also puts an end to the ever increasing server sprawl across branch offices, which leads to benefits like managing costly security, management, deployment and administration.

The need for network backups to complete on time so they can meet their disaster recovery requirements is another thing that is putting companies under intense pressure. The benefit; when everything is moved to the data center is that it can be centrally monitored, backed up and configured by the centralized IT staff.

The limitations to the consolidation trend that come into play mostly come from technology barriers or organizational barriers which can be subjective. Talking of technology barriers, the main problem lies in the situation when services cannot be delivered efficiently over the WAN. This is where WAN optimization comes into play. The term WAN optimization refers to a collection of techniques that sharpen the performance of applications written for high speed LANs, when they are accessed through lower speed and latency prone WANs.



Having an optimized WAN solution helps enterprises gain the benefits of centralized servers and storage while maintaining LAN -like performance for remote users. This is what WAN accelerators can help deliver to the organization. When implemented properly, they can resolve performance problems thta users typically encounter when they access applications over the latency-prone, bandwidth-constrained, and over-utilizedWAN.

A simple deployment:
Deploying a WAN accelerator for optimizing the communication between a branch office and the data center isn't a rocket science, not conceptually at least. To do this, you need two WAN accelerators. The equipment is placed at both ends right after the Firewall of your network. When a packet is sent from your network, it is accelerated by the WAN hardware and then crosses the firewall. On the receiving end, it is accelerated right after the packet is checked at the Firewall and vice versa.

We' tested the scenario, and the results and improvements in speed can be seen in the product reviews (See Riverbed Steelhead product reviews in this story). The good thing is that they can provide better performance even on lower bandwidth. Moreover, WAN accelerators today also provide advanced features like virtualization capabilities, which means you can consolidate all your virtual machines on the WAN accelerator itself, thereby reducing the power requirement and management cost in the branch offices.