Having a Wide area network is not enough, it is important to maintain a network that is efficient for both data and information transfer. WAN acceleration or WAN optimization is the combination of several techniques and technologies used in raising data efficiency of data transfer across the network.
WAN optimization is an essential part of network management in the sense that it helps to make traffic the important factor and reserves bandwidths for most critical operations.
Some of the technologies used in Wan acceleration are valuable assets that need to be discussed to appreciate the technology that is taking over the wide area network with a bang.
- Traffic shaping
Traffic shaping helps to prioritize traffic and bandwidth allocation is done according to the most important need. Traffic admin and operators have the liberty to determine applications that must take precedence on the network.
- Dedupilcation
Deduplication removes the transfer of redundant data on the network. This is done by sending references instead of the real data. It is working at the bytes level to increase benefits across the IP applications.
- Data compression
In order to limit bandwidth usage, data compression compresses the size of the data use similar to file compression. Compression is achieved by replacing data patterns that appear frequently in the data with patterns that can be represented more efficiently to reduce the overall size and inflated to original size on the remote site of the WAN by undoing the compression process.
- Protocol spoofing
In protocol spoofing, several requests from many applications are bundled into one, streamlining protocols may also be in this category like CIFS.
- Optimization
Latency optimization involves refinements such as scaling to window size, choosy acknowledgment. In some WAN the optimizer is defined to answer requests of clients locally without sending to the remote server, this method helps to reduce latency in WAN.
- Loss Recovery
It prevents packet loss by making provision for every packet of data that is transferred on the network. For every packet of data sent on the WAN, there is record keeping to ensure that a packet lost in transmission can be immediately retransmitted before higher layer protocols detect there was an anomaly. This will improve the performance of applications in error prone WAN networks.
- QoS Prioritization
Depending on the data usage, prioritization makes the decision of what needs instant priority or low priority. This is almost always important where congestion can be experienced even for a few milliseconds or micro burst.
- QoS Rate limits
The rate limits will limit specific applications to ensure they are not able to consume too much the network resources that will lead to poor performance to business critical applications.
- Data caching
Data are stationed in local caches e.g. web caching. When applications access the same files several times, over and again, the files can be served from the local cache.
- Access Control
Denying access to unwanted applications on the wide area network helps to prevent unwanted applications utilizing network resources and hence reserve the bandwidth to business critical applications to ensure they perform consistently and predictably.
Wan optimization or WAN acceleration is the future of data transfers in wide area networks. It helps to reinforce the efficiency of data transfer across a WAN. Every organization that deploys Wan needs the expertise of Wanos to help in setting up WAN optimization technology that best suits the organization.
Blog Source: wanosnetworksblog.wordpress.com
