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WAN & App Acceleration Channel

News and Analysis

Brocade ADX 12.4 Improves App Delivery

Brocade introduced a new application delivery controller that enables service providers to manage application delivery in a way that servers or endpoint devices no longer can. A key feature of the Brocade ADX 12.4 is what the company calls an OpenScript Engine, which enables enterprise service providers to build customized versions of network applications using the open-source Perl programming language to deliver networking capabilities unique to their needs.

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Architectures

Bringing Customer Experience And Business Channel Development Together With IT

As one of the largest hospitality companies in the world, Marriott has over 3,500 lodging properties in the U.S. and 69 other countries and territories, and a daily workload of over 750,000 new reservations. Transaction throughput must be rapid, unfailing and 24/7. If problems arise, failover must be swift and absolute. Simultaneously, business intelligence systems must be able to "right fit" pricing and accommodations for customers during transactions--and the systems must have the ability to extend the "reach" of Marriott's reservation community from the company-hosted Website and systems to the Websites and systems of worldwide channel partners that sell Marriott reservations along with other services.

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Reviews & Workshops

Rapid Backup And Retrieval With Riverbed's Whitewater

Cloud storage brings cost effective offsite backup and retrieval capabilities to small and midsize businesses, but using cloud storage as an external disk is not as effective as it seems, particularly as the data set grows. It takes time to send and retrieve files to a cloud storage provider and often means using another set of tools to do so. Riverbed's Whitewater appliance makes the cloud storage appear as a backup target and balances the competing needs of speedy read/writes and long-term bulk storage. Using a combination of local file caching and deduplication with cloud storage replication, IT gets the best of both worlds.

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Blogs

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Riverbed's Granite Virtualizes Branch Office Storage

February 10, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks

When Riverbed and others brought WAN acceleration to the market around the turn of the century, many of us hoped that with WAN acceleration we could pull the servers, and the headaches they cause, from branch offices. Unfortunately, many organizations found reasons to keep servers in the branches. Riverbed's new Granite appliance allows organizations to keep servers in their branch offices while eliminating many of the headaches through what Riverbed's calling Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure.

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Tags: Riverbed, WAN acceleration, servers, branch offices, Granite appliance, Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure, cache, Steelhead, iSCSI, storage, StorSimple, TwinStrata, cloud, data center, LUNs, VMware,

Channel: Private Cloud, WAN Security, Networking & Mgmt, Next Gen Network, Servers & Storage, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Public Cloud, WAN & App Acceleration

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Raining On Cloud Bursting's Parade

August 09, 2011 01:05 PM
Posted by Mike Fratto

Cloud bursting--the ability to dynamically move processing temporarily to a cloud provider in response to some excess demand--sounds like such a great idea. If successful, you can continue to handle the excess burst without having to acquire new hardware, software and licenses, and, equally important, you can do it right now. But before you start popping champagne corks and taking a celebratory lap, you will likely have some significant hurdles to get over.

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Tags: private cloud, cloud computing, cloud bursting

Channel: Private Cloud, Cloud Computing, WAN & App Acceleration

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BufferBloat And The Collapse Of The Internet

April 21, 2011 07:00 AM
Posted by David Greenfield

It seems that every few years there's yet another prognosticator that the Internet is about to collapse. Once it was the stellar growth in bandwidth demand driven by the phenomenal increase in Internet-connected devices. At other times, it was the lack of Net neutrality (see this video). Still other times, it was sinister attacks on BGP or the fact that we've run out of IPv4 addresses.

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Tags: WAN Optimization, end to end APM

Channel: End to End APM, Next Gen Network, WAN & App Acceleration

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Welcome To The WAN Optimization Shell Game

April 11, 2011 09:30 AM
Posted by David Greenfield

In the early days of Ethernet switch vendors, IT organizations would routinely hear vendors profess to deliver better line rate performance at 20 percent less than the market leader. The catch, because there was always a catch in this industry, was that performance was only achievable in specific circumstances. Turn on port monitoring or enable encryption and Ethernet switch performance would skid to a halt. A similar story may be brewing in the WAN optimization space. While vendors, such as Blue Coat, Riverbed, and Silverpeak, rush to tell us about how they can achieve incredible performance improvement, turning an OC-3 into an OC-12, other limiting factors may prevent end users from actually seeing those numbers.

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Tags: Blue Coat, Riverbed, Silver Peak, WAN Optimization, application performance management, end to end APM

Channel: End to End APM, WAN & App Acceleration

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The Importance Of Correcting Packet Loss In VDI

March 30, 2011 11:13 AM
Posted by David Greenfield

Recently, on the LinkedIN WAN optimization professionals group, I participated in a conversation around whether virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is ready for the WAN. Face it, delivering responsive VDI over the WAN is going to be a challenge. One of the interesting points that came up was the importance of correcting for packet loss when considering WAN optimizers.

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Tags: Riverbed, Silver Peak, VDI, VMware, end to end APM, virtual desktop infrastructure, virtualization

Channel: End to End APM, Networking & Mgmt, Next Gen Network, Virtualization, WAN & App Acceleration

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What WAN Optimizers Can Learn From Firewalls

March 11, 2011 10:28 AM
Posted by David Greenfield

Listening to the give and take about WAN optimizers made me remember another battle between networking giants. It was nearly 10 years ago, during the early days of firewalls, when it seemed Marcus Ranum, then with Network FlightRecorder, would go head-to-head with Check Point's Gil Schwed on a weekly basis. Ranum was among the early creators of the application proxy and was vociferous about the value of delivering a firewall that terminated and inspected every session before passing the contents onto the destination. It was very effective, very secure and yet ultimately eclipsed by competing approaches.

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Tags: APM, BlueCoat, Cisco, Citrix, NetEx, Riverbed, Silver Peak, WAN Optimization, end to end APM, firewalls

Channel: End to End APM, WAN & App Acceleration

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