WAN optimisation technology: important to the local market?

WAN optimisation is becoming an increasingly important issue for business as IT departments face delivering more applications at a higher performance across a wide area network.

IDC defines WAN optimisation products as hardware and software that compress data streams, monitor traffic flows, prioritise traffic via QoS, and manage applications from a protocol perspective. As business activities extend beyond the local area network, the demand for an efficient and cost-effective WAN solution rises. IDC predicted the market for WAN optimisation management products will grow from $236 million to $427 million by 2008.

Stephen Elliot, senior analyst, IDC discusses the pressures faced by WAN managers and how vendors try to address them with compression, quality-of-service and application monitoring tools.

“Users are continuing to invest in new WAN optimisation tools to reduce branch office bandwidth costs, improve or maintain application availability and simplify IT infrastructure globally,” said Elliot.

In his opinion, vendors should be dedicating resources to developing or acquiring compression solutions in anticipation of future user demand for more advanced technologies.

Efficient and consistent delivery of corporate applications has been recognised as a significant issue affecting the growth of a business. While ordering more bandwidth was the previous bandaid response to delivering more applications and improving performance over a wide area network, there are other options to consider.

WAN products claim to speed up applications across wide area networks without requiring network managers to upgrade bandwidth. Being notoriously expensive is one of the main reasons for the slow uptake of the technology. IDC claimed that the future of WAN optimisation management includes technologies that will incorporate dynamic business policies, pattern-matching capabilities and protocol analysis with correlation and automated actions.

This solution will also need to address the problem of application performance being affected by TCP, which aims to ensure that packets are delivered successfully, often at the expense of performance.

“[Vendors should] recognise that compression will increasingly be a starting point for savvy users looking for better QoS control, more network security visibility and protocol analysis, and application management,” Elliot wrote in the report.