To improve the end user’s experience an
appliance is added that optimizes the bandwidth. This appliance is usually
termed as WAN accelerator.
The appliance can be attached in the form
of a physical hardware component, software program or an appliance running in a
virtualized environment. In simple terms, its job is to speed up the time taken
for information to flow back and forth across the WAN. The major techniques
applied by the WAN accelerator are
compression and data deduplication to reduce the amount of data that needs to
be transmitted. What an accelerator does is, it cache the duplicate files or
parts of files so they can be referenced instead of being sent all over again
through WAN.
Initially, accelerators required to set up
a dedicated hardware appliance at each end of the WAN link to make things work
smoothly. It was acceptable by large enterprise WANs that needed to connect the
branch office to a centralized corporate data center. This was not feasible for
the company’s mobile or remote users as it would take up most of the space and
with all the wiring it created trouble. Taking all these parameters in mind WAN
accelerator vendors introduced mobile software clients that act
as localized appliances. This would allow the remote user’s computer to cache
duplicate files and parts of files locally. These mobile clients can either
connect to corporate WAN accelerator hardware appliances or to dedicated
headquarters servers.
As the WAN acceleration market developed
many products also evolved as per the needs. The distinction between WAN optimization controllers (WOC) and
traditional WAN accelerators lies in its functionality. The WOC offers
compression and disk caching like the earlier version and in addition to this,
it also optimizes the WAN link. It works by accounting the known problems that
arise with common network protocols. This protocol optimizes by cleaning up the
chatty protocols that are used in common enterprise standards such as Common
Internet File System (CIFS), Microsoft Exchange and even TCP/IP. This works by
eliminating the typical overhead found in these communication protocols.
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