Meeting the Challenge of Scaling Application Performance for the Global Organization

Many organizations are using server virtualization to consolidate application workloads in their datacenter. By using a highly efficient platform like Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) organizations find that they can improve asset utilization, and dramatically lower IT costs. This enables the datacenter team to be more responsive to initiatives that produce real value for the business.

The server platform and virtualization address one part of the application delivery challenge for the global Enterprise. UCS can easily handle the compute requirements of complex applications, but what about the increased demand placed on the WAN as applications are delivered to a distributed workforce? How do you ensure an acceptable user experience? Accessing information over a WAN is much slower than accessing information over a LAN, due to limited WAN bandwidth, packet loss, and latency. To meet this challenge a solution needs to both scale the server platform and increase WAN performance.

Applications not only need to run fast in the datacenter; applications must run successfully for the end users wherever they may be. Organizations are finding that they must consider application acceleration as a part of their application solution architecture so that that they not only scale application performance on the server, but also delivery applications to reach remote sites with high performance to serve the users at every location.

There are a number of situations where WAN Optimization technology is critical to the success of your applications. If you are consolidating datacenters many of your users will be farther away from the applications than they were and the WAN will impact application performance. If you are consolidating branch office servers to the datacenter your users will feel the effects of the WAN. If you are rolling out new applications, especially those that are designed to run on your new powerful virtualized server platforms, you need optimum WAN performance to provide an acceptable end user experience. Virtual desktop technology reduces the work load on the IT department, but it creates more traffic over the WAN, and without optimization performance can be poor. You might need to move virtual servers between datacenters in the case of server failure or to serve more users in other locations, and without WAN optimization these moves can take considerable time, impacting business continuity. If you are incorporating cloud computing in your application delivery strategy WAN optimization plays a crucial role in ensuring performance for users who are far from the hosting center.

Cisco offers a solution to meet the challenge of making applications successful for all users. Cisco UCS combined with CiscoWAAS provides a highly efficient, virtualization-optimized computing platform tightly integrated with proven application acceleration over the WAN. See this whitepaper for a look at how organizations can use this solution to meet their objectives for increasing user productivity while reducing IT costs.