Are You Getting Top Performance for Your Oracle Applications over the WAN?

After attending Oracle Openworld in October I've been thinking about performance issues with Oracle applications over the wide area network (WAN). With the changing business environment IT organizations are re-architecting how they deploy enterprise applications. Oracle applications automate business processes and increase productivity, but in this new network-centric world their performance is being impacted by longer WAN links and inefficient Internet protocols resulting in reduced performance and decreased user productivity.

Globalization and outsourcing has created a workforce that is spread across the world. At the same time, to reduce IT costs resulting from the spread of regional systems, and to take advantage of large scale virtualized systems, organizations are centralizing their application and IT infrastructure in the data center. The result of this trend is that the distance from the end user to the application server has increased dramatically and the connection is often over links with limited bandwidth.

Are You Getting the Whole Picture as you Optimize Application Performance?

As you deploy optimization to improve application performance over the WAN you need to know what kind of results you are getting. To help understand the benefits of deploying these systems you might be looking at reports from the WAAS central manager or to get end-to-end results you might have deployed probes from an NMS vendor. These reports can provide useful insight into the benefits of optimization; however there is more to the picture that you might want to look at. What if you need detailed data for planning, performance analysis and troubleshooting across network elements and you need to save on the costs of deploying these systems?

Let’s say you need to quantify the impact of WAN Optimization on application and network performance, or you need to perform throughput analysis of LAN/WAN bandwidth to justify the benefits a deployment. You might need a way to leverage performance data gathered in proof-of-concept scenarios in your analysis, or you might want help in identifying the best links for optimization or to be able to characterize the end-user experience with transaction and session-based statistics.

Important Considerations When Choosing a WAN Optimization Solution

WAN optimization technology is becoming more strategic to application delivery as IT organizations become more dependent on the WAN for delivery of applications and services to remote users. In initial trials many IT organizations deployed this technology to a few key locations to solve bandwidth or latency challenges. The main selection criteria were around the core features such as data compression and application response time improvements.

These days IT organizations realize that WAN Optimization is an integral part of an application delivery network and they realize that they need to look beyond the original selection criteria and consider how it fits in their network architecture when planning a network-wide deployment. Let’s take a look at some of the important considerations when choosing a solution for improving application delivery.

Early WAN Optimization solutions delivered applications over tunnels that obscured traffic from reporting and monitoring tools. These days IT organizations need a solution that is transparent to the network and doesn’t interfere with routing architectures and doesn’t interfere with services and security on the network.

Does Your Application Performance Reporting Overcome WOC Distortion?

The first surprise you will get after you consolidate your branch office servers in the data center is that application performance over the WAN falls off and user productivity suffers. To fix this you deploy WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs) so your applications go much faster and you recover bandwidth that was lost to redundant traffic. After the WOC’s are installed a strange thing happens to your performance reports. Application response appears to be instantaneous. It’s as if the distance between your data center and your branch office shrunk to nothing. We know that you can’t overcome the speed of light and there will always be some latency on WAN links. So what happened?

What happened is that the WOC distortion effect has come in to play. WOCs proxy TCP at each end and send acknowledgments immediately. As result performance monitoring systems lose visibility to the actual round-trip time. WOC distortion poses a challenge to getting accurate end-to-end performance analysis. To understand how your applications are performing you need to know the average response time between client and server, the Network round trip time to move data from one node to another as well as the server’s response time to a request and the data rate that was achieved.

Are You Getting the WAN Advantage to Your Branch Office?

Are your WAN services delivered as a part of a comprehensive plan? These days with the need to reduce costs it’s a good time to rethink how you are serving your branch office IT needs. With advances in technology you can do things in new ways. You might find that you can reduce your branch office infrastructure and deliver better services to your branch office workers. There are a few things to consider. Are your branch office routers capable of delivering a suite of services including security? Are you taking advantage of unified communications? Are you supporting increasing use of Video? Are you able to ensure application performance?

There are plenty of reasons to rethink your WAN strategy. If your organization is global then your people need to collaborate across greater distances but if you are consolidating branch office servers and data centers they are further than ever from the applications that they use, especially if you have increasing numbers of mobile and home workers. Security is an increasing concern with so many new applications and services being used bringing increasing numbers of exploits. Service delivery can be impacted by inconsistent WAN topologies that were developed over time and don’t take increasing end user traffic in to account. All of these challenges mean that productivity can be impacted unless a consistent plan is executed on.

Is your WAN Optimization Solution Meeting the Application Acceleration Challenge?

The economy is in a downturn and your IT budget is cut and now management is asking you to come up with ideas on how to save money and increase the business’s productivity. There a number of proven initiatives you can undertake and there are some newer ones you might be looking at to get the most benefit, but they all impact performance of applications over the WAN and that means that you need a WAN Optimization solution that can meet the challenge.

Many organizations are consolidating file servers from the branch offices to the data center to reduce the number of underutilized servers and take advantage of server virtualization to get the most out of newer higher performing servers. Organizations are increasingly moving to Web-based applications to eliminate the need to install client software on the PC and to simplify application administration. A WAN Optimization solution helps in these cases by providing caching and compression to speed file transfers and acceleration for HTTP and SSL, but is that enough?

Is Application Acceleration Enough for Performance Over the WAN?

Branch office users are crying out for better performance of business-critical applications over the WAN. The impact of latency and congestion as well as limited bandwidth is affecting their productivity. Research shows that business performance starts to decline when applications exceed a 5 second delay in response times. This makes a job of IT departments challenging as they look to support business services and mitigate revenue loss while saving on bandwidth costs and getting the most out of their current enterprise resources as they work with limited budgets.

The inability to prevent performance issues before end-users are impacted is the top challenge for managing application performance over the WAN. How to deal with the increase in voice and video traffic is another, as well as the lack of visibility into the end-user experience. Organizations are also challenged by increasing transfers of large files between network locations and an increase in complexity of applications.

Is Application Performance Management the key to WAN Optimization Services?

WAN Optimization is a top technology under consideration by IT organizations according to research by The Info Pro in their Technology Heat Index report. Many Service Providers are creating WAN Optimization services to meet the requirements of customer who want WAN Optimization but prefer to outsource management.

Organizations know that they can reduce IT expenditures as well as deliver new services more effectively by consolidating IT resources in the Data Center and by deploying WAN Optimization they can still give branch office users LAN like application performance. Whether organizations deploy WAN Optimization themselves or get it as a managed service they need to be able to justify the budget expenditure and that means being able to fully understand their requirements and being able to measure the performance improvements delivered of deployment of WAN Optimization.

An effective evaluation starts with an accurate baseline of network and application performance, followed by a determination of which applications are good candidates for acceleration. Once WAN Optimization is deployed application performance improvements need to be validated against the baseline. Available network paths should be utilized according to application needs and network resources should be aligned with application performance requirements.

Is WAN Optimization the Answer to Today’s IT Dilemma?

In today’s challenging economy many customers are asking how they can reduce IT costs while responding to increasing demands for IT services? What do you do in tough economic times when you need to lower branch office IT spending but at the same time you need to provide new productivity tools to branch office workers?

Your branch offices are where your customers come to do business so your branch office workers need IT resources that let them conduct business efficiently. In the past the answer was to install distributed computing systems in each branch office. These days that solution is costly to implement and to maintain, especially with reduced IT staffing.

Many organizations are moving applications to the data center, to reduce IT costs and gain better control over data, but that means greater demands are being put on the WAN, which impacts application performance. At the same time organizations want to ramp up their use of VoIP to extend the reach of their telephone network and bring costs down, but VoIP is especially sensitive to network congestion. So what should they do?