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WAN acceleration technology key feature is improving performance of applications across enterprise wide area networks. The WAN acceleration concept is about improving application performance over WAN links that have increased or high network latency. WAN acceleration software is changing the way IT operates. The key is to find a solid partner that can help you properly deploy these solutions.

WAN acceleration products is critical to ensure application reliability and performance across globally dispersed locations and remote users. Performance improvements will vary greatly depending on the type of application that is being accelerated. WAN acceleration can make data replication and disaster recovery plans much easier to implement. Many WAN accelerators use techniques such as compression and de-duplication to overcome the latency issues seen with wide area networks.

Companies such as Cisco, Blue Coat and Riverbed are key providers of appliances that use sophisticated algorithms to compress, cache and accelerate the transmission of large amounts of data over sometimes low-bandwidth WAN links. Most organizations don’t want to continue maintaining servers at their branch offices.

Riverbed technology enables remote offices or home workers and remote backups to operate with LAN like performance. Riverbed appliances are easy to deploy and configure. Riverbed and Juniper offer significant technical advantages over Cisco, a fact recognized by Gartner in the last magic quadrant report, and still Cisco find a way to win the hearts and minds of the end users. Riverbed recently announced they would be VMware enabled such that virtual services can run on top of Riverbed’s Steelhead acceleration appliances. For example, a local branch could run a local print server from their acceleration appliance.

New to Riverbed’s feature set is acceleration for Oracle Forms, Lotus Notes and encrypted MAPI. Riverbed’s relationship with VMware and Microsoft have helped them continue to add great features and functionality.The Riverbed-VMware-Microsoft relationship has allowed Riverbed to continue to add great functionality and features to their WAN accelerators.

In the past, WAN accelerators would cause application performance monitoring issues but with new advancements this is not much of a problem. Here is a short list of some areas that WAN acceleration can help with:

• IT Efficiency
• Cost Savings
• Mobile Workers and Traveling Executives

Here is some feedback typical of what we see once WAN accelerators are installed: Data recovery times have dropped from 72 hours to less than 24 hours and bandwidth capacity has increased eight-fold. Users no longer experience delays in accessing live data, and the improvement in application acceleration has led to the implementation of new projects.