While everyone would enjoy a faster running network, achieving WAN optimization is not an easy task. For those who have discovered its secrets, the benefits are many and measurable. In a recent Computer World article, some of these secrets are revealed.

Hitachi (News - Alert) Consulting

Michael Shisko is the director of IT for Hitachi Consulting. His company began searching for WAN optimization gear when it made the switch from an Internet VPN to a hub-and-spoke MPLS WAN service.

Shisko told Computer World that while 60-70 percent of the company's VPN traffic was not eligible for optimization due to traffic to and from websites, 100 percent of the MPLS WAN traffic qualified. To find the right solution, he tested WAN optimization devices from Silver Peak, Riverbed and Blue Coat (News - Alert).

Hoping for greater results, Shisko noted the response was essentially a dud. Statistical improvements in performance were measured, but users care about their own experience and this was barely improved. Users did not receive LAN-performance speed.

Without significant performance gains for U.S. sites, there wasn't enough motivation for buying near gear. The company made the decision to install it between the data center in Dallas and its European offices as it did cut response times on key applications from several minutes down to several seconds.

Hitachi Consulting then set out to implement a solution that would improve performance so users would actually notice. Blue Coat optimization gear was chosen for the international sites. The company already used Blue Coat's traffic monitoring/shaping gear, Packet Shaper, and the latest strategy included tight integration, enabling the company to achieve intelligent acceleration.

Booz & Co.

Booz & Co. had a slightly different goal as the company was centralizing branch servers in an effort to reduce capital and operational costs. Ted Theofanos, senior manager of IT infrastructure for the firm, tested a number of different solutions and preferred the Cisco (News - Alert) WAN optimization gear because it tunneled traffic in separate TCP sessions. As a result, the solution enabled more detailed monitoring of traffic over the WAN.

Booz & Co. was able to gain a reduction in traffic that was 20-40 percent of the volume it consumed before optimization. As a result, the company did not have to expand bandwidth on its MPLS network as fast as it would have without the implementation of the Cisco solution.

Columbian Chemicals

Eric Mermelstein is the enterprise infrastructure architect for Columbian Chemicals and his company tested WAN optimization gear before settling on Riverbed. The company installed the gear at 18 sites over a meshed MPLS WAN from Verizon (News - Alert), which helped to eliminate 14 local servers and their associated costs.

As a result of WAN optimization, the company was able to boost application performance by reducing congestion. Some sites had been running at 100 percent capacity during business hours. These same sites have dropped to an average between 50 and 60 percent.

Changes to the Columbian Chemicals disaster recovery strategy so that it replicates roughly 600GB of data per night between the main data center in Arkansas and the disaster-recovery data center in Georgia. Without WAN optimization in place, the process would have taken 48 hours, according to Mermelstein.

Texon

This firm that specializes in the transportation of crude oil and tracking needed to improve disaster recovery. Sean Brown, senior network administrator for the firm, noted that the company wanted to speed up data replication between the Houston data center and the disaster recovery center in Conrow, Texas.

With the implementation of optimization software from Certeon (News - Alert), replication is run every day and completed in eight hours. Exchange is replicated 10 to 12 times per day and SQL data replicates every 15 minutes or so.

The best advice from these companies that have already implemented WAN optimization systems:

• Use a range of sites to get data that is representative of varying conditions when testing in your own environment.
• Do your analysis of network traffic first to determine WAN performance requirements.
• Minimize encrypted traffic.
• Evaluate vendor best-case performance claims in your environment.