WDS and How it Can Accelerate and Simplify Your IT Infrastructure

A Riverbed Technology White Paper WIDE AREA DATA SERVICES - OPTIMIZING THE REMOTE OFFICE
WIDE AREA DATA SERVICES
Optimizing the Remote Office
© 2006 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 0 WIDE AREA DATA SERVICES - OPTIMIZING THE REMOTE OFFICE
WIDE AREA DATA SERVICES - OPTIMIZING THE REMOTE OFFICE
Distributed Organizations and Their Challenges Distributed organizations come in all sizes and shapes. Even small organizations may have multiple locations connected by data networks around the world. For the largest enterprises, even the simplest usable network is a complicated arrangement, while the most elaborate and sophisticated networks have unbelievable layers of replicated and interlocking functionality. Whether a distributed organization is small or large, whether its networks are simple or elaborate, each faces similar business challenges: making the distributed organization efficient and effective in its use of the Wide-Area Networks (WANs) that tie the organization together. Often these business challenges show up as IT and WAN issues at remote offices, satellite offices, or branch offices, which we'll group together and call simply branches. Poor application performance and poor control of information at branches are both common examples of ineffective use of WANs, which leads to reduced productivity and dangerous exposure to liability. Excessive spending on network bandwidth and high administrative costs for branches are both common examples of inefficient use of WAN resources: throwing away money that could be put to better use.
What are the underlying causes of these challenges? The network of a distributed organization typically consists of an identifiable richly-connected core and an identifiable weakly-connected fringe. The core typically includes most servers, many clients, and most of the organization's available bandwidth. In contrast, the fringe typically includes most of the organization's remote locations. Operations between clients and servers in the core occur at the speeds typical of Local-Area Networks (LANs), whereas operations involving clients in the fringe happen at speeds typical of WANs. Typical WAN bandwidth at the fringe is only 1% or less of the typical LAN bandwidth, while latency (the time required to take a single end-to-end round trip) is often 100 times longer or more on a WAN than on a LAN. Because the fringe has network capacity that is 100 times narrower (bandwidth) and 100 times longer (latency) than the core, it is not surprising that performance is often a problem. With this problem in mind, we can consider how to solve the effectiveness and efficiency challenges at branches by making the WAN perform more like a LAN. Previous attempts to address these challenges have been narrow, leading to deployment of a variety of local servers, various kinds of caches, and an assortment of compression or TCP-optimization devices. (See figure above).
The Wide-Area Data Services Solution Making the WAN behave more like a LAN has two components: 1) delivering dramatic performance improvements, especially for those applications or protocols that show the worst degradation when running over a WAN, and 2) contending with a wide spectrum of protocols that are crossing the networks of a distributed organization.
© 2006 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 1 WIDE AREA DATA SERVICES - OPTIMIZING THE REMOTE OFFICE
Solutions that deliver this broad-spectrum improvement of WANs go by the name of Wide-area Data Services (WDS). Wide refers not only to the WAN but also to the wide applicability of WDS, and the wide spectrum of bottlenecks improved by WDS. WDS is not only a solution to attack problems of ineffectiveness or inefficiency, but also a means to realize goals that would otherwise be impossible: . Centralizing distributed infrastructure like file servers, mail servers, Network Attached Storage (NAS), and remote office backup systems - without affecting remote users . Sharing large files among colleagues on different continents - as if they were in the same building . Performing backup and replication over long distance WAN links - and completing them during backup windows that were unachievable just a year ago . Delivering significantly more services on existing WANs - without upgrading bandwidth Vision for Remote Branch Offices . Minimal branch office infrastruc... [download for more]