WAN Optimization Grows Up

We've talked in the past on this blog about WAN Optimization, and recently Enterprise Storage Forum ran article called "WAN Optimization Grows Up", so I thought it'd be interesting to cover the article and see how it's changed and what's new about WAN Optimization.

Paul Rubens, the author starts the article by talking about how the market for WAN Optimization has evolved and is now mature, with most vendors offering about equal acceleration capabilities, so the need to differentiate products with something other than acceleration capabilities is becoming important.

Rubens describes some of the evolution of WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs) below:

Two areas where WOCs are becoming increasingly common are at the very high end, connecting multiple data centers together for backup and redundancy purposes, and at the very low end, connecting mobile users and teleworkers to corporate servers to improve the performance of the applications they run.

As a result, the form that WOCS are taking is beginning to change. Data center to data center WOCs responsible for high-bandwidth links are increasingly powerful hardware appliances, while branch office WOCs may be hardware appliances, or virtual appliances running on general purpose computers. Eventually it's possible that WOC functionality will be moved to the branch office router.

In addition in the remote office Rubens talks about the trend towards running software based WOCs directly on the end-user's workstation or laptop.

At the bottom end there is a trend toward software WOCs running on end-user machines, often with a more limited functionality than dedicated hardware WOCS. "There is definitely a need for soft WOCs," said Rolfe. "If an organization has centralized its file servers, then even an 8-meg DSL line will be slow at bringing data across, and a high bandwidth line doesn't really help reduce latency in protocols like CIFS anyway. The availability of soft WOCs is becoming an increasingly important part of the selection process for many companies looking to implement a system."

Rubens talks about what customers are looking for in the WOCs as well:

Another important selection criterion is the specific accelerations that are available for particular applications. Most WOCs provide CIFS and HTTP acceleration, and acceleration for applications such as SQL and Oracle, and to a lesser extent SSL encryption is also commonplace. "Vendors are moving up the stack," said Rolfe. "People are interested in VDI, and we often get inquiries about a particular app like AutoCAD."

Finally Rubens looks at the trends in the WOC players themselves:

One trend that is emerging is a resurgence of interest in QoS and traffic management, reporting and control. Interest in this was high a decade or more ago, but that subsided as many organizations became more interested in data compression and caching.

...

As part of this trend, Blue Coat Systems (NASDAQ: BCSI), a market-leading acceleration company, bought Packeteer, a leading traffic management vendor, in mid-2008, while Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), another market leader in the acceleration space, bought Mazu Networks, another leading name in the network and application monitoring and control market, in January of this year. Just about all the other major acceleration vendors now offer traffic management functionality of some sort too.

It's obvious WAN Optimization is evolving. Features and functionality will continue to increase, and it's more than just a proxy with some WAN acceleration built in that we talked about in our first articles on WAN Optimization.