In a recent Q&A conducted by COX Communications, two WAN optimization industry experts, Nigel Hawthorn of Blue Coat Systems and Adam Davison of Expand Networks (News - Alert), presented their thoughts on the future of WAN and WAN Optimization.

While consolidation of servers into the center of their network to reduce costs and ensure better management was on top of the list, sophisticated (often web-based) applications came second, followed by rise in video streaming for training and meetings to deliver more effective communications.

The need to access internal services whenever and wherever users may be was number four in the order and general increase in bandwidth requirement came fifth. All five of these trends are driving the amount of traffic on the WAN. Hence, CIOs are looking up to WAN optimization to accelerate data delivery and reduce WAN bandwidth usage, according to Hawthorn.

For Adam Davison (News - Alert), corporate vice president of sales and marketing at Expand Networks, WAN optimization has evolved from a tactical “nice to have” feature to a key enabling technology for many strategic IT initiatives such as server consolidation, virtualization, server based computing and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

In fact, according to Davison, an effective WAN optimization solution is critical to the overall success of these projects, including the ROI or TCO. Add to this the move to centralized, lean IT, distributed enterprise operations and a disparate workforce and you create what we describe as the ‘proximity gap,' whereby applications and services become further and further distanced from the user, said Davison.

So how is WAN Optimization lowering communication and bandwidth cost was the next question?

Hawthorn identified four techniques-remote caching, byte caching, protocol optimization and data compression -- that reduce inefficiencies in data transfer. And, thereby, reduce the amount of bandwidth used for each request.

Together, these four techniques can reduce traffic needs and ensure that users furthest away from the data and on the weakest WAN links can still have an effective delivery of shared information.

To Davison, optimizing bandwidth usage is the foundation building block of WAN optimization. By optimizing the traffic flowing over the WAN you are able to send more data, resulting in more efficient use of available bandwidth, which could lead to bandwidth consolidation and reducing a company’s overall bandwidth requirements and costs, says Davison.

Hence, notes Davison, it becomes crucial when faced with upgrading bandwidth to cope with increased traffic demands. Optimizing the WAN and achieving greater throughput can therefore negate the need for these costly bandwidth upgrades, according to Davison..

When asked to explain in what ways improved WAN optimization can boost productivity within organizations,Hawthorn pointed toward improvements in user response-time as a major benefit of WAN optimization. He highlighted the fact that how many times have users been held on the phone while the operator says, “I’m just looking up your record, sorry to keep you waiting, the network’s slow today”? The organization that can access the customer’s data the fastest will win the most business, argues Hawthorn.

With WAN optimization in place, users can work efficiently further away from the data source… while still providing fast response times to their customers. Without WAN optimization, he adds, remote users tend not to attend global streamed training and senior management meetings – therefore missing out on the latest information. The ultimate goal should be that every user receives instant responses to every question, wherever they are located in the world, he continues.

To this question, Davison’s reply was that the ‘proximity gap’ created by centralized IT and distributed operations can potentially be counterproductive. Any cost savings achieved through IT consolidation can be eroded by lost user productivity and efficiency. This is where WAN optimization becomes a critical enabler in assuring the business performance is not adversely affected, says Davison. Plus, he adds, collaboration with partners and suppliers is key in achieving competitive advantage. The ability for customers to communicate with an organization via multiple channels, using web based services and applications, is paramount.

Expand’s visibility and control capabilities combined with advanced WAN optimization techniques allow IT to identify, monitor and accelerate the performance of business-critical applications across the WAN, ensuring that the user experience is productive and efficient and that effective communication with customers, partners and other stakeholders is assured, asserts Davison.

How does WAN optimization support the virtual office concept, which allows workers far greater flexibility in terms of where they work?

This was another question posed to the two experts. According to Blue Coat’s (News - Alert) Hawthorn, the main beneficiaries of WAN optimization are those users furthest away from company headquarters with the worst WAN links.

WAN optimization vendors have client software for laptops and other platforms that implement some of the WAN optimization technologies, so that people can work from home and when traveling, and still benefit from better data delivery, states Hawthorn. .

In addition, the virtual appliances available from some WAN optimization vendors allow a remote office deployment to be of low cost, if it can run on industry-standard hardware. Often a remote office will have a server that is underutilized – by deploying a WAN optimization virtual appliance, the users in that office can benefit from optimization previously available only to larger offices, argues Hawthorn.

In addition, he notes, data routing is often through corporate connections, so any WAN optimization along the path of the data will benefit the user wherever they may be.

“There is a saying that work is what you do, not where you go,” stated Davison. He explained, WAN optimization enables disparate employees to create ‘virtual office’ environments by delivering the corporate applications and services needed – virtually anywhere. “We call this ‘virtual proximity’ – putting the user in virtual proximity of business applications and service,” he added.

Supporting a ‘virtual office’ requires a mix of both physical and virtual solutions. At the

central site and remote offices, a physical device may be deployed, as there is adequate space and facilities to house the appliance, says Davison. However, when it comes to the remote user who may be working from home, a serviced office or on the road, deploying a physical device is often not possible. To overcome this, a virtual WAN optimization offering is needed. According to Davison, Expand’s Mobile Accelerator (MACC) addresses this issue and makes the virtual office a reality as opposed to a concept.

To expand on what gives your product the edge in this competitive market,Hawthorn quickly highlighted Blue Coat’s efforts to drive down the cost for most remote users, with entry-level prices sometimes less than half of competitors, free client software, and virtual appliance software that can run on existing standard servers.

Other WAN optimization vendors only support a small sub-set of data formats and protocols in their solutions –  and some haven’t moved from supporting Microsoft (News - Alert) file sharing(CIFS) and email (MAPI), repliedHawthorn. But today’s networks are full of HTTP, HTTPS and various streaming applications. Blue Coat’s support for stream caching (for on-demand streams) and splitting (for live streaming) – even for Adobe Flash (nowadays the most common streaming technology) and optimization of SaaS (News - Alert) HTTPS content – ensures that the fastest growing technologies are also being optimized, asserts Hawthorn.

“We are increasingly seeing customers who want to consolidate the number of network devices in their network, so Blue Coat’s optional security soft ware (that runs on the same hardware) allows customers to deploy WAN optimization and web security at the same time”, affirms Hawthorn.

Davison’s response emphasized the fact that Expand is unique in its ability to be both deployed as a virtual solution as well as being able to optimize and accelerate virtualized traffic flows. “We enable IT to leverage their existing virtual infrastructure of choice as opposed to having to use the proprietary hardware that is dictated by other vendors”, states Davison.

“Our Layer 7 QoS capabilities mean that we can gain visibility and control of over 400 business applications, ensuring prioritization and assuring all TCP and UDP traffic, including real-time applications such as video and VoIP,” said Davison. He stated that the company’s virtual and physical offerings that were most flexible deployment options in the market. Furthermore, he continues, our breadth of portfolio means that we can span the entire enterprise IT infrastructure, from the data centre, to the branch office, to the remote site, to the mobile worker.

Add to this the ability for all devices to be centrally managed, monitored and controlled via our management platform ExpandView and we believe we have the most comprehensive, technically advanced and cost-effective WAN optimization solution on the market today, concludes Davison.