Submitted by: Lawrence Reaves
Companies have concentrated a great deal of time and effort on the LAN (Local Area Network). This is all changing as the pressures of globalization and virtualization make companies focus more attention on the WAN (Wide Area Network).
The distance data has to travel is increasing greatly. For many businesses, the days when they accessed information from a server located in the same office building are pretty much over. Virtualization has given increased impetus to the centralization of data and applications, so data centers have sprung up to hold company information and business applications. Data and applications are now being pushed out to users in increasingly disparate branch and remote locations, while demands for mobile access are increasing almost exponentially.
At the same time, globalization means that businesses are frequently conducting operations around the world. WANs are typically spanning continents instead of a couple of states. The nature of modern, global business is 24/7 and the need for a true 24/7×365 network to support the business and users has emerged.
In short, we have massive amounts of data being pushed along long connections, to widespread locations from centralized data centers. Note, we haven t even mentioned disaster recovery or business continuity yet, which adds a massive data burden to the mixture.
The problem is that many company networks are faced with a very real shortage of bandwidth. Bandwidth s price is falling, but it is still expensive, and the reality is that for many, they are at the operating ceiling of their networks. This means that companies must either upgrade their network infrastructure or do much more with what they have, and this at a time when budgets are excessively constrained due to the economic situation.
WAN Optimization as the Answer
Investing in infrastructure upgrading is not required; indeed, it can be deferred by several years. The solution to bandwidth constraints and delivery of services to users is to do more with what you have. WAN optimization is the process by which the network is assessed and especially the data which is traveling along it. By controlling what data is being transmitted and in particular, allocating data priorities and eliminating chatty protocols, such as CIFS or making smart use of storing data in local cache s, huge savings in bandwidth can be achieved. In addition, data transmission can also be greatly accelerated such that up to 90% savings in bandwidth usage can be achieved (and that is not an idle, blue-sky thinking figure).
The average payback for WAN optimization is typically between five and 13 months with no massive hardware investment to make. The results are immediate with bandwidth cost savings, but for many companies, once they have acquired freedom from bandwidth constraints, they tend to look at deploying additional business productivity tools to utilize the newly-freed bandwidth now available.
Typical deployments include establishing appropriate and effective disaster recovery and business continuity solutions; deploying a cost-saving VOIP solution as the first step in embarking on a Unified Communications strategy, and; centralizing data and applications to reduce operating costs and provide greater mobile access to users.
About the Author: Lawrence Reaves is a strong believer in
Richmond IT services
such as
Richmond network security
and Richmond cloud computing. For these services, Lawrence recommends PLANIT Technology Group, a
Citrix technology partner
. PLANIT Technology Group can be found online at: PLANITTech.com .
Source:
isnare.com
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