The need to integrate with routed traffic came up in at least one recent implementation, Carlson Wagonlit's adoption of WAN/WAFS appliances from Expand Networks. "Further integration and transparency in QOS management would be a welcome development," said Daniel Oertli, Carlson Wagonlit's vice president of IT for Asia-Pacific. (See Carlson Wagonlit.)
Still, the use of WAFS in a routed environment may simply be a matter of convenience and nothing more. "We were updating our routers anyway, and we figured that as long as we were doing that, we could add this feature," says Bryan Nash, SVP of IT at McHenry Savings Bank in Illinois. Nash has endorsed upgrades in the Cisco 2800 and 3800 ISRs, which support WAAS through new modules.
In contrast, vendors like Riverbed argue that a standalone appliance can provide the sheer electronic muscle needed to significantly compress and move large amounts of traffic over the WAN, without interfering with routing or switching.
Case in point: one customer's need to reduce WAN costs by cutting the time taken to transfer large files. "Because we have a global hardware/software development model we are constantly transferring large compressed files (greater than 500MB) on the WAN," states Walter Curd, CIO at Marvell Semiconductor, in a prepared statement. He says Riverbed's Steelhead appliance has tripled the transfer speed of a compressed file and increased the speed of an uncompressed one by 40 times.
"There are many different WAFS solutions out there today and it can be confusing to decide which ones to pick," writes analyst Dianne McAdam of the Clipper Group consultancy in an email today. "Customers have to look at several factors: support from the vendor ... scalability ... performance ... cost. Some solutions will allow bandwidth between the remote and central site to be throttled ... Other solutions will only send over the changed data."
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