Definition
Businesses are serving an increasingly global customer base, and those customers have the highest of expectations for the variety, quality, and responsiveness of the services they receive. The corporate network and applications infrastructure has continued to expand in size and complexity to help ensure customer expectations are fulfilled. Paradoxically, this growth often introduces the very performance concerns it was designed to address.
Cisco created its comprehensive Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) solution to enable enterprises to operate at peak efficiency with their distributed architectures, and to put them on a path that will allow them to consolidate their footprints without sacrificing their performance objectives. Cisco WAAS’s data redundancy elimination functionality delivers WAN bandwidth optimization and improved application performance for all TCP applications. Its transport flow optimization feature provides improved WAN throughput. And its application-specific acceleration capabilities promote improved Layer 7 performance for file-sharing, email, Web, collaboration, software distribution, enterprise, backup, data replication, and video applications. With Cisco WAAS, businesses get a network-integrated system for overcoming performance limitations created by limited bandwidth, inefficient application protocols, network latency, packet loss, and chatty protocol behavior.
Applications The challenge for firms today is to maintain the highest possible levels of service delivery while containing and cutting their capital and operating expenditures. That means getting the most out of existing bandwidth, tuning applications to execute with maximum effectiveness, and ultimately reducing the number of sites, servers, applications, and personnel required to achieve the business’s mission. Because Cisco WAAS is integrated into existing network devices, companies realize its benefits without having to deploy additional acceleration appliances throughout the infrastructure – easing network operations and management while minimizing ownership costs.
Cisco WAAS is ideal for organizations with an extensive network of branch offices. The solution empowers firms to preserve and secure their TCP-based information that must be shared amongst constituents, easing compliance concerns and encouraging business continuity. Bandwidth-intensive applications such as live video can be transmitted throughout the enterprise without sacrificing performance. Perhaps most significantly, Cisco WAAS positions IT departments to centralize applications, servers, and storage in a small number of datacenters while maintaining LAN-like applications performance at remote locations. As a result, field site costs are minimized, employee productivity is improved, and IT gains the agility it needs to respond rapidly and precisely to changing business needs.
Key Considerations Cisco WAAS offers tremendous upside potential when deployed properly. Notwithstanding the advantages of datacenter consolidation that it facilitates, the solution’s application acceleration functionality can improve performance by a factor of five or greater.
What’s critical is determining which applications are the best candidates for acceleration (taking into account factors such as throughput limitations, high response times, and high levels of packet loss) and validating benefits once the solution is operational so a true measure of return on investment can be calculated.
Traditional network performance monitoring devices and tools lack the visibility and end-to-end perspective necessary to conduct the pre-deployment assessments to optimize the Cisco WAAS implementation and the post-deployment analyses to confirm the solution is delivering maximum value with respect to key metrics such as bandwidth consumption reduction and end user response time improvements.
To that point, a quote from a recent Aberdeen Group Market Alert, “…understand that it is becoming very difficult to get full benefits from solutions for acceleration and control if they are not coupled by solutions for visibility into application performance”
To overcome these obstacles and ensure they receive the greatest possible return on their Cisco WAAS investment, businesses need a next-generation performance management solution that can gather, retain, assess, and display the requisite breadth and depth of information in real-time and over the course of time. With this platform, the IT organization will be able to:
- Establish performance baselines before and after Cisco WAAS deployment.
- Compare accelerated versus non-accelerated performance of an application.
- Verify anticipated performance improvements.
- Gain a deeper understanding of how Cisco WAAS is accelerating end-to-end WAN traffic and how the actual policies are being applied with respect to users and transactions.
- Assume the end-user’s perspective to truly understand performance.