Lately I’ve been dealing with WAN accelerators a lot, with the emphasis on Cisco’s WAAS (some other, smaller players are Riverbed, Juniper, Bluecoat, Tacit/Packeteer and Silverpeak). The premise is simple and compelling: Instead of having all those servers at your edge locations, move your users’ data to the core and make accessing the data feel almost as fast as having it locally, by deploying appliances that act as proxies. At the same time, you will actually decrease the WAN utilization, enabling you to use cheaper pipes, or at least not have to upgrade, where in the past you were planning to anyway.
Continue reading “Cisco WAAS benchmarks, and WAN optimizers in general”