Web Acceleration 2.0: Now No One Has to Wait

By Lori MacVittie | Technical Marketing Manager, Application Services
Web Acceleration 2.0: Now No One Has to Wait
Overview After spending years and millions of dollars deploying a web-based, mission-critical application, the last thing you want to hear is that the rollout is going poorly due to performance issues. But, as organizations continue to migrate to browser-based deployments, that's often exactly what happens. While users enjoy the virtually ubiquitous access to applications-regardless of location-enabled by browser-based clients, they are dissatisfied with the performance of web-based applications versus their old fat-client counterparts. Combining reduced performance with an increasingly distributed workforce introduces yet another set of factors that contribute to even more disappointing performance. WAN latency and errors prevent web-based applications from being delivered quickly and often result in congested WAN links. A plethora of network and application issues coalesce into a perfect storm, impeding performance and hampering the usability of multi-million dollar investments. Adding a dose of Web 2.0 technologies to the enterprise application mix (whether as part of an existing packaged application such as Microsoft Outlook Web Access or as a completely new initiative) only exacerbates the decline in performance for remote and mobile users. If you're worried about the performance of your web applications, you're not alone. According to research by TechWeb Network Research, 75% of IT and applications managers experience anxiety related to application performance and 25% report physical aches and pains along with 1their unease . These fears are not ungrounded, as there are a myriad of issues that negatively impact the performance of your applications. Network, client, and data center issues all play a role in how well your web applications perform. An application delivery network can act to alleviate the challenges inherent in delivering web applications over a widely variable network.
Delivery Challenges Understanding the types of applications being delivered can greatly improve the ability to optimize and improve their overall performance by identifying the challenges particular to different types of applications.
Dynamic Applications Dynamic applications-occasionally referred to as "data driven" applications because of their reliance on data sources such as relational database management system (RDBMS) and external content management systems-present a unique challenge to performance. Personalization, external data integration, and dynamic images combine with constantly changing corporate data and an increasing trend to consolidate data centers to hinder application performance in numerous ways.
Static Content While most information in web applications trends toward 100 percent dynamic, there is still a great deal of information that is not truly dynamic and yet is often marked as such by default. Logos, images, and other various pieces of corporate information do not change drastically over time, but because it is included in pages and applications that mash-up information from sources
F5 Networks, Inc. - 1 - © Aug-07 By Lori MacVittie | Technical Marketing Manager, Application Services
that are dynamic and constantly changing, static data ends up being constantly retrieved from servers that are already overburdened. Yet the cost and effort to rewrite an application that properly marks content is often too high to justify the performance benefits that might be gained. Third-party solutions that eliminate the effort behind, and reduce the cost of, accurate content identification are often discarded in favor of proprietary technologies that distinguish between truly dynamic and static content, resulting in a stalemate among vendors.
SOA Gartner estimates that Increasingly, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the 50 percent of new primary method of integration for both applications and organizations. Internally, SOA-based services are the critical applications and foundation from which critical applications and business processes will be process are built while the interoperability of standards-based SOA-based in 2007, application messaging enables rapid connectivity between and as many as 80 percent partners on both sides of the supply chain. of these new initiatives As the interconnectivity... [download for more]