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WAN & App Acceleration Channel

Blogs

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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.

See all blogs by David Greenfield

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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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The First IPv6 WAN Optimizer: Speed At What Price?

February 16, 2011 01:57 PM
Posted by David Greenfield

Last week, Blue Coat upgraded its MACH5 to become the industry's first IPv6-compatible WAN optimizer. WAN optimizers have long supported tunneled IPv6 over IPv4, but the MACH5 is the first WAN optimization appliance to accelerate native IPv6--and then some. The MACH5 is actually a very sophisticated IPv6 application layer gateway (ALG), providing IPv6 connectivity, security and optimization in a single device. Yet it's precisely its sophistication that raises questions around device scalability and price.

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Tags: IPv6, WAN Optimization, end to end APM

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

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WAN Optimization and the VDI Challenge

February 14, 2011 11:56 AM
Posted by David Greenfield

I was sitting in on a peer-to-peer exchange about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) hosted by Wikibon and listening to how great VDI is for organizations. I asked about multisite VDI and what recommendations people had for implementing VDI between sites. The speaker paused and said that she hadn't see any multisite implementations. No surprise there. VDI itself is still in its infancy, but it hit me once again that if organizations are going to see VDI's benefits at the remote office, they've got to pay close attention to their WAN acceleration layer.

See all blogs by David Greenfield

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Tags: Riverbed, Silverpeak, VDI, VMware, WAN Optimization, WAN acceleration, end to end APM

Channel: End to End APM, Virtualization, WAN & App Acceleration

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Data Centers: The Next Frontier For WAN Optimizers?

January 06, 2011 11:04 AM
Posted by David Greenfield

Signs of the increasingly pivotal role that WAN optimization is playing in the enterprise can be seen in the emergence of hybrid cloud architectures within corporate networks. As Mike so poignantly pointed out in his blog, the simple ability to run a VM does not make an application ready for the cloud. If developers are to leverage on-demand services, such as Amazon's EC2, they need to rethink how they architect their software to leverage a hybrid cloud environment.

See all blogs by David Greenfield

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Tags: WAN Optimization, WAN acceleration, cloud computing, end to end APM, virtualization

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

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