Changing the Application Business
Model
In light of the challenges discussed in
this chapter so far, IT organizations have begun turning to new ways of solving
complex infrastructure, productivity, and performance issues. A new class of
networking technologies called application
acceleration and WAN optimization helps to overcome many of these obstacles. These
technologies are deployed on devices called accelerators, which reside at
strategic points in the network—typically one or more exist on each end of a WAN
connection—and employ advanced compression, flow optimization, latency
mitigation, and other techniques to improve performance and minimize bandwidth
consumption.
These devices are fundamentally
changing the application business model and IT at large, as they enable
centralization and consolidation of resources while ensuring performance service
levels. As such, remote users are able to work with remote servers,
applications, data, and more and receive performance that is similar to that of
having the infrastructure in the same office. In short, accelerators help to
mitigate the performance challenges presented by the WAN and ensure more
efficient and effective utilization of network resources.
Accelerators and the foundational technologies that they
employ are the topic of the remainder of this book and will be examined in more
detail in later chapters.
The first step, prior to
deploying accelerators, in transforming the way enterprise applications and
service infrastructure are deployed and managed and optimizing networks to
support business-critical application traffic is to have full awareness of how
the network, in particular the WAN, is being used. Several utilities are
available today to analyze and categorize the traffic that traverses a network.
Utilities ranging in cost from freeware to multiple millions of dollars provide
deeper inspection and granular examination of traffic flows.
These utilities help application and
network administrators understand how to ensure that the network is provisioned
in such a way that packet handling is aligned with business priority and
application requirements (discussed at length in Chapter 3, "Aligning
Network Resources with Business Priority"). These utilities also help
application and network administrators understand what traffic needs to be
addressed when considering a solution leveraging accelerators. Each application
that traverses the WAN reacts differently to an accelerator, so understanding
what traffic is crossing the network will help to determine which applications
can be optimized and which ones will better function without optimization or
require no optimization at all.
After determining which applications
can be targeted for optimization, consider how the client uses these
applications. Business applications utilize several different methods of
interaction, including client to server, thin-client to server, and web-based
sessions. Also included in this consideration should be any protocols that are
natively leveraged by the operating system to map to remote resources, such as
the Common Internet File System (CIFS), the Network File System (NFS), the
Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI), and remote-procedure call
(RPC)-based services.
In some cases, removing servers from
branch locations and centralizing the applications, storage, and management in
the data center will prove to be not only possible, but also more cost effective
and efficient when combined with the addition of an accelerator solution.
Leveraging an optimized WAN will allow branch locations to reduce their overall
operating and capital expenses while maintaining the overall user experience in
the branch, and allow for a greater level of control over the traffic that
traverses the WAN.
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