So I’ve been working on a project at Southco to help speed up our WAN connections throughout the globe. Since we have 24+ sites around the world there is no doubt that there would be latency and bandwidth constraint problems. This is where this project came in. In the world of networking there are many pieces that can slow down a connection across the WAN link. First, there could be a physical barrier to overcome (such as getting data from Philadelphia, PA to Shi Yan, Shenzhen, China) which includes latency and jitter in the line — this is nearly unavoidable. Another major issue that we face today is the problem of chatty protocols and TCP causing slowdowns. TCP has window sizing which continuously shrinks exponentially each and every time a packet is lost in the process. Protocols such as CIFS and HTTP are extremly talkative and require many round trips to send just a small amount of data back and forth. Finally there are bandwidth constraints that play into slow-downs. Each day we send more and more data over the WAN links, just like every other company out there, and can’t afford the time or resources to continuously grow these network lines.
When I began to look at how to tackle this project I setup a list of items that we had to fix and then started reading. I read reports from vendors of WAN acceleration products, Gartner reports, independent research groups and hit the forums that I belong to to find out what other people were using. I found out two things very quickly — 1) This was not going to be an inexpensive fix in the short run, and 2) There was an abundant amount of offerings out there and they all had their advantages and disadvantages to each. After reading for many weeks on this subject I finally decided to try out two vendors’ products. The first was Riverbed’s Steelhead Appliances and the second was Juniper’s WXC.
So the next task was to begin the demos. We started out talking to Juniper and Riverbed and explained what our network architecture looked like. That went smooth with both vendors. We got in the four demo boxes from each vendor to place in our Corporate location and three other locations and began the demo of the Riverbed appliance.
