How do You Consolidate Data When You Manufacture at Locations around the Globe?

This is the question that VF Corporation was faced with. They are a global leader in branded lifestyle apparel with more than 30 brands, including Wrangler, The North Face, Lee, Vans, and Nautica. They sell through retailers in 150 countries and their workforce is distributed across 770 global offices. To reduce IT costs they were consolidating branch office servers and applications in centralized data centers, but this created a challenge with transferring large CAD image files.

VF Corp used a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) application for apparel design that was hosted on servers in the branch office. The IT department wanted to deploy a new application in the data center to reduce the costs of maintaining it and give them better control over data. The designers use this application all day every day and need access to the large CAD image files that it creates, so this move presented a challenge to the WAN over which these files would have to travel.

“When we tested the new application during development, downloading images over the WAN took an average of 2 to 3 minutes, and up to 5 minutes,” says Billy Yawn, the network architect, for VF Corporation. “Before deploying the application to branch offices, we needed a WAN acceleration solution.”

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.

Can Managed Service Providers Help the Enterprise Meet their Application Performance Goals?

The success of today’s enterprise relies on the performance of applications over the WAN. The use of bandwidth-intensive, web-based applications (such as videoconferencing and collaborative applications) that are utilized over the WAN creates a challenge for network managers who need to ensure application performance while dealing with limited resources. Application Performance Management (APM) requires monitoring tools and the expertise to use them. The question is how you ensure that you are properly optimizing your applications without having to invest in additional resources.

The answer to this situation could be to rely on your Managed Service Provider (MSP) to deliver an application performance management service. Outsourcing the management of the enterprise WAN could ease both your management burden and reduce IT costs while providing a way to ensure application performance. Many MSPs are meeting their customer’s needs to increase services while holding down costs by providing managed network, data center, and application services. However, to capitalize on these opportunities, managed service providers must overcome a number of challenges themselves.

MSPs are looking for ways to increase the value that they deliver to enterprise customers as traditional services become commonplace. Enterprise customers want more than a simple WAN pipe. They are looking for service level agreements for their critical applications and they want application performance assurance regardless of the connection type or the geographic location. At the same time both the Enterprise and the Managed Service Provider need to achieve a reasonable ROI on their IT investments.

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.

What is the Biggest Intangible Benefit of WAN optimization?

WAN optimization technologies have many benefits, some easily measured and others that are intangible. The latter might be more important to the organization. Many customers tell us that they realize both tangible and intangible benefits from deploying Cisco WAAS. Tangible benefits include reduced or avoided bandwidth costs, reductions in branch office servers and a reduced branch office equipment footprint. These cost savings are realized since Cisco WAAS eliminates duplicate data transmission, enables branch office server consolidation and integrates with the Cisco ISR router. These tangible benefits can be fairly easy to measure as we shall see. Intangible benefits can be more difficult to measure, but they can often be more compelling. Let’s look at an example of a customer who has experienced both types of benefits.

Recently a customer told us that they expect to save $400,000 per year by deploying Cisco WAAS. Brisbane Australia based mining and heavy equipment supplier Hastings Deering says they achieved a rapid ROI with their WAN optimization project that connects their data center and remote office locations. The Hastings Deering Group sells and supports Caterpillar heavy equipment used in the mining and construction industries across Queensland, the Northern Territory and the South Pacific region, including Papua New Guinea. With a network of 65 nodes connecting to corporate applications in Brisbane, CIO John Birch says there was a constant battle to keep branch response times low for all its applications. “About 18 months ago we decided to take a look at network options other than just increasing bandwidth and we started exploring WAN optimization products”

Cable & Wireless: APM Managed Services Differentiation

Organizations are changing how they use the network to access applications and managed service providers are changing their network services to meet the challenge. As they centralize applications and access them across the WAN organizations need a network that delivers their applications with high performance and they need to see how their applications are performing. Managed service providers are meeting customer’s requirements by moving away from offering standard low feature WAN links and creating new innovative application performance management (APM) services that accelerate applications and provide customers with real-time information on the results that are being delivered.

In this video Steve Horwath, Product Manager at Cable & Wireless, talks with Stephen Makayi, Marketing Manager at Cisco, about the growing demand for application performance and the Cable & Wireless managed WAN optimization service, which provides customers with optimized application performance with advanced reporting, which in turn give customers information they can use to drive their business. Steve discusses how APM enables managed service providers to deliver an application-aware network with uptime guarantees for applications that changes the conversation MSPs can have with customers, from selling plain WAN links to providing application performance assurances, and putting the MSP in the role of a trusted advisor.

Fuji Television Uses Cisco WAAS to Accelerate their Vancouver Olympics Coverage

The Olympics give us a chance to marvel at and enjoy the performances of athletes who demonstrate their intense dedication to the pursuit of excellence and their determination in the face of fierce competition. The games are a worldwide event and with audiences in the home countries anxious to see their athletes’ performances national television stations also have a challenge that they must meet. Fuji TV of Japan is no exception. With a long history of Japanese participation in the winter Olympics and a large home audience to serve, they have set up shop in Vancouver. Making this trip can be a costly undertaking and given the distance back to Japan they needed help in keeping communications smooth and keeping costs down.

To communicate with the home office Fuji TV set up a dedicated line between the company’s data center in Odaiba, Japan and the Olympic Media Village in Vancouver, a distance of over 7500 km. This connection provides Intranet access enabling the on-site staff, including production and news employees, to access the head office file servers and use its systems. This long distance WAN access allows Fuji TV to avoid having to transport and install data and application servers at Vancouver and thus avoid the cost of additional on site staff to maintain these servers. By reducing staff the costs savings is considerable, including air travel, housing, transportation and food.

Forrester Acknowledges Cisco as a Leader among WAN Optimization Vendors

In their Q4 2009 WAVE report Forrester recognized Cisco WAAS as a market leader in WAN optimization in their comparison of the top 8 vendors, considering criteria such as the offering, strategy, market presence, and technology.

Forrester says that WAN optimization is increasing in importance to IT organizations and that business issues such as consolidating branch office servers and rolling out new collaborative applications are driving its adoption. This is because companies rely on the WAN for delivery of their business-critical services, but the WAN suffers from poor performance because of latency over distance.

Forrester advises that WAN optimization technology plays a critical role in improving application performance by using techniques such as caching, protocol optimization, compression, traffic management and quality of service (QoS), to increase effective throughput and mitigate latency, while providing visibility into the traffic mix.

Optimizing Delivery of Applications from the Cloud

The adoption of cloud-based computing promises to improve the agility, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of IT operations required to provision, scale, and deliver applications to the enterprise. As with other technology trends, delivering applications from the cloud, to remote sites, creates challenges with application performance, availability, and security.

Enterprise IT departments are continuing to invest in technologies that generate cost savings while making their business applications more agile and available. These initiatives, such as consolidation of branch-office servers and virtualization of data center servers, are increasingly being adopted by the enterprise; however, they have not been without consequences. For example, branch-office server consolidation projects, while reducing the server footprint, can result in a poor end-user experience and increased bandwidth utilization because applications traverse a WAN link with higher latency and packet loss and lower bandwidth than they traverse a LAN link. WAN optimization solutions, such as Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), are implemented to deliver LAN-like application response times for end users and to defer a WAN bandwidth upgrade.

Optimizing your Hosted Virtual Desktop Delivery Architecture

Delivery of hosted virtualized desktops is seeing increasing up take by organizations that want to reduce the cost of deployment and management of end user systems. While desktop virtualization offers many advantages, there are benefits to be gained in performance, scaling and security that can be addressed by choosing the right hosting platform and networking components. By optimizing the network architecture organizations can host and deliver the highest number of view images and users sessions while keeping down the total cost of ownership.

For example by hosting virtual desktop images on the Cisco Unified Computing System organizations can greatly increase the number of images per server while reducing complexity, by taking advantage of capabilities such as memory capacity, virtualized adaptors, Unified Fabric and centralized management that is integrated with solutions from VMware.

By using Cisco ACE to provide server load-balancing services organizations can greatly increase the number of user sessions per server, while increasing system security, by taking advantage of SSL off load and TCP reuse capabilities and built in intelligent security functionality, and they can realize cost reduction through virtualization capabilities and integration with provisioning systems from VMware.

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?