How Do You Extend WAN Optimization to Reach 30,000 Mobile Users?

Let’s say you are an IT manager and you are tasked with extending WAN optimization out to your small office and mobile workers and you have upwards of 30,000 users to serve. You might be looking at Cisco WAAS Mobile, a software-based WAN Optimization solution that provides application acceleration capabilities for PCs and decreases application response times by 3 to 30 times by mitigating latency and increasing link throughput.

Typically a deployment supporting 30,000 users would require several servers to host the mobile gateway, but it is likely that your mandate is to keep down the costs of the solution. A server that can scale to the required level and that offers the flexibility to use virtualization would make the best platform. Using virtualization is an ideal scenario for WAAS Mobile as it can be remotely installed on a virtual machine and remotely managed.

Our customers have told us that they have both scaling requirements and budget constraints, so we looked for the right solution to meet these needs. The answer is to deploy WAAS Mobile on the Cisco Unified Computing System UCS C-Series platforms, which are powerful, virtualization-optimized computing platforms that can host resource-intensive networking applications such as Cisco WAAS Mobile, providing scalability and deployment flexibility.


A UCS C-200 M1 runs 10,000 WAAS Mobile sessions averaging under 50% utilization.

In validating this solution we found that a UCS C-200 M1 supports up to 10,000 concurrent WAAS Mobile users while enabling the Cisco WAAS Mobile gateways to be incrementally deployed on virtual machines as needed. The power of the Cisco UCS platform enables Cisco WAAS Mobile to scale to meet the demands of the world’s largest enterprises. Since WAAS Mobile is based on a concurrent-user access system and in typical deployments one concurrent-user access can serve three to four actual
end users, a single UCS C-200 M1 server can service a user-base of 30,000 to 40,000.

For a detailed look at this solution please see this white paper “Cisco Wide Area Application Services Mobile and Cisco Unified Computing System: Extend Data Center Scalability and Flexibility for Mobile Users.