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White Paper
Acceleration 101
Acceleration is a term used commonly today. What is it? What does it really do for your applications?
by Peter Murray Technical Marketing MangerWhite Paper Acceleration 101
Contents
Introduction 3
What Is Acceleration? 5Acceleration Components 6Server Load Balancing 6Global Server Load Balancing 7Compression 7Data Deduplication 8Caching 9Optimizing TCP 11General TCP Optimizations 11Decreasing Server-side TCP Connections 11Increasing Client-side TCP Connections 12HTTP Protocol and Web Application Optimizations 13SSL Offload 14
Conclusion 15
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Introduction
Getting your applications to work properly over a Wide Area Network (WAN) is a complex task, and it is not likely to get easier any time soon. Trends such as data center consolidation, the advent of Web 2.0 applications, and the move to web-based application delivery have only served to increase complexity and slow user response times. Often, the result is sluggish application response and at worst, abandoned applications and shopping carts due to slow or failed web page loads.
The good news is that you can do something to improve application performance over slow or congested WAN networks. An Application Delivery Network can accelerate your applications and help make sure they're secure, fast, and available.
Throughout this paper, Wonder Widgets, Inc. will serve as an example company. Wonder Widgets, Inc. manufactures the uPozr, an MP3 player with WiFi capability and embedded internet applications and the uFony, a mobile phone-enabled version of uPozr. Customers buy direct from sales representatives internationally, and purchase online as well.
Wonder Widgets, Inc. has a global footprint, with headquarters and data center located in Paris, a major design/engineering branch office and back-up data center in San Diego, software development outsourcing in Mumbai, and device manufacturing and branch offices in multiple sites in China. Finally, they have a globally distributed sales/distribution force working from several branch offices, home offices (SOHO), and mobile workers. Wonder Widgets, Inc. has 10,000 employees worldwide.
Wonder Widgets' primary revenue sources are from supplying and delivering content for their devices via the Internet, in addition to ad revenue received from hosted applications on their devices. They provide both a service for purchasing MP3 files as well as a Web 2.0 community site, which enables users to create their own web space and web applications for use on their device.
Figure 1 shows the global distribution of Wonder Widgets, Inc. offices.
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Figure 1. Wonder Widgets' Inc. offices
Wonder Widgets, Inc. is experiencing great success with its social networking site and content delivery applications. However, with the latest releases of applications for the uPozr and uFony performance of their download site was severely degraded due to demand spikes. Additionally, users reported the performance of the social networking site has consistently slowed over the past year. The board of Wonder Widgets, Inc. is concerned about these performance lapses and wants the issues resolved as soon as possible.
Kristina is the CIO for Wonder Widgets, Inc. During the most recent board meeting, she was asked to find a solution for their performance issues. She is already somewhat familiar with the industry but asks her team to investigate acceleration technology, figure out where it will fit in their current setup, and create a short list of potential vendors. Her first task is to make sure she and her team understand the components of acceleration and what makes the most sense for Wonder Widgets, Inc. She calls a meeting with her team to discuss the project.
Bruno, the network architect, is somewhat skeptical about acceleration but willing to participate. His previous company deployed a compression solution that was supposed to solve their slow application performance, but it only helped solve a couple of problems, had no effect on others, and was management-intensive. He's continued to read about acceleration technology in the trade press, but sometimes finds vendor claims to be conflicting and confusing.
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On the other hand, Anne, the application architect, has heard from... [download for more]
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