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ShareWAN Accelerators
Posted by Mike DeMaria on November 19, 2004
We tested three units per vendor (a central office unit and two remote units). Generally, you'd need one more WAN accelerator than you have WAN links: one central office unit, plus a unit in each branch office. And because each manufacturer uses proprietary compression, all the devices must be from a single vendor.
The accelerators can be deployed in a hub-and-spoke or mesh topology, based on your organization's setup. Devices that require you to create links manually, however, are difficult to configure in a mesh environment. That's one limitation of Expand's and Swan Labs' accelerators. By comparison, Packeteer's PacketShaper Xpress, which detects peers and sets up a compression tunnel automatically, makes the configuration process easier across the board.
You'll also want to consider using each vendor's centralized management software, especially if you're managing a large number of WAN links in a mesh setup. Centralized management software can be deployed anywhere, but ideally on a separate Windows server in the central office. The management software polls all units and pushes configuration files to all appliances.
Rules of Compression
As a general rule, the more compressible the data--text files and Web pages, for instance--the better the throughput. In one of our benchmarks, we transferred 30 Web pages over a simulated T1 link in 93 seconds. With compression enabled, that time fell dramatically: 24 seconds, for example, when we tested Peribit's SM-500. Binary files, nonrepeating data, VoIP (voice over IP) traffic, streaming video and already compressed traffic don't fare as well as Web and text files. When we transferred a 15-MB data file composed of random ASCII and extended ASCII characters, we shaved off only a second or two.
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