Any organization seeking to achieve WAN optimization must educate themselves on the available options in the market. Expand Networks (News - Alert) aims to help in the process by comparing its solutions against those offered by Riverbed. As the user experience is a main area of concern in WAN optimization and therefore it is important to identify the most powerful solution.

A release of the RiOS WAN optimization solution from Riverbed promised to optimize real-time applications including Microsoft Terminal Server (RDP) and Citrix Xen App (ICA) by using RAM (News - Alert)-based caching. Expanded opted to test this solution using these applications and focused on compression results, with and without other applications and examined screen handling/refresh rate.

Upon implementation of the Riverbed (News - Alert) solution, most of the process was to be expected and no surprises emerged along the way. Once configuration was complete, however, Expand noticed one glaring omission – Riverbed had not included L-7 monitoring. In essence, the solution had discovered the ICA and RDP protocols, but would not allow testers to see inside traffic flows to determine which applications were being used. Expand concluded that the platform was simply a queuing-based service that offered little in the way of true traffic control across the network.

When the Expand WAN optimization solution was launched, the units were up and running all traffic without complex adjustments to aching mechanisms. In addition, RDP and ICA were discovered correctly and it was easy to determine which applications were being used within the ICA flows. With the ability to discover applications at L-7, prioritization could be assigned to applications.

It did appear that Riverbed had put effort into getting their latest release to accelerate real-time traffic and greatly reduced the access time for cached data. Their all or nothing approach, however, may be the thing that sunk the solution as it does not work for all applications. The solution essentially changed from having a point solution for block based traffic to having a point solution for real-time traffic, which poses a number of problems in WAN optimization.

Expand outperforms Riverbed in two key areas – the ability to classify at L-7, which Riverbed cannot do; and Riverbed cannot truly guarantee bandwidth. In WAN optimization, bandwidth guarantees need to be made where the data meets the user. At the same time, the solution needs to be able to scale according to the bandwidth and data needs of the user or it isn’t truly delivering WAN optimization.