WAN Optimization

WAN Optimization is an important part of network management. It allows the priority of traffic and a guaranteed amount of bandwidth for applications. With WAN Optimization, unwanted traffic can be blocked, schedule inbound and outbound traffic, give priority to certain hosts, and enforce other policies.

WAN Optimization is a collection of techniques for increasing data-transfer efficiencies across wide area networks. The most common measures of TCP data-transfer efficiencies are throughput, bandwidth requirements, latency, protocol optimization and congestion.

Two common Business WAN topologies:
– Branch to Headquarters for email, content management systems, database applications, and Web delivery.
– Data Center to Data Center (DC2DC) include replication, back up, data migration, virtualization, and other Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery BC/DR flows.

WAN Optimization techniques include deduplication, data compression, data prioritization, latency optimization, caching/proxy, forward error correction, protocol spoofing, traffic shaping, equalizing, connection limits, simple rate limits. Sample of Optimization Technology are VPN Tunneling or Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).

WAN optimization offers increased network and bandwidth scalability, improved application performance and high availability.  Some Companies implementing WAN Optimization are Bluecoat, Cisco, Citrix, Juniper.