Facing the Unavoidable WAN
Nearly all remote locations today have
some form of network connection that connects the location to the data center or
an intermediate location such as a regional office. This connection, commonly a
WAN connection in the case of a remote office, carries all traffic to the data
center and beyond via fiber, cable modem, DSL, satellite, metro Ethernet, or
other interconnect technology. Today, WAN traffic comprises more than just file
server access, file transfer, data protection, and e-mail message transmissions;
business and personal Internet traffic, streaming media, printing, management,
enterprise applications, and thin client sessions all traverse the same shared
WAN connection. Although the WAN now has to support traffic that might not have
been planned for in the past, all of this traffic needs to share this
connection. In this way, the reliance of the IT organization on the network
continues to increase over time, and the demands placed on the network increase
as well.
In today's business model, many
times the users, and the applications and content needed by the users, dictate
what services the WAN supports. The web browser, for example, was traditionally
seen as a non-business-critical application on the user desktop. Some operating
systems used to support the full removal of the web browser. Today, the web
browser is one of the first applications a user launches after logging into the
workstation. The web browser is now the portal into business-critical
applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource
planning (ERP), and document collaboration applications, and to personal
destinations such as e-mail hosting sites and web logs, known as "blogs."
As more and more applications
transition from client/server to browser based, and as application vendors
continue to standardize applications on web-based protocols such as the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Extensible Markup Language (XML), the
dependency of the web browser will only increase within the corporation. This is
one form of traffic that will call for a significant amount of awareness and
optimization when planning for the future.
Most traditional business functions rely
on protocols that are more client/server centric. The Common Internet File
System (CIFS) protocol is one of many widely used and accepted protocols for
reading, writing, transferring, or otherwise manipulating content stored on a
file server share. CIFS is commonly recognized as a protocol that has a lot of
overhead in terms of client and server transactions, and is recognized by many
enterprises as costly to WAN links, but necessary to support the needed business
transactions and productivity functions when file shares are
centralized.
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