What is WAN optimization technology? WAN optimization (also called WAN acceleration) is the group of tools, techniques, and practices used by IT teams to improve data transfer performance on a Wide Area Network (WAN).
These tools and techniques have the goal of improving efficiency when sending/receiving data between data centers or between an organization’s remote locations.
WAN optimization is the process of optimizing WAN traffic flow. The basic idea is to split up the software services your company operates and pass the traffic between them using different paths, rather than having them all run on one main server.
Many network administrators use this approach to improve the performance of their sites. The basic idea is to split up large websites into smaller, more manageable servers and pass traffic between the servers using different paths, rather than queuing up requests on one main server. This allows the overall system to handle more traffic while still maintaining a stable level of performance.
One of the goals of WAN acceleration is to improve the user experience when accessing the site or application. WAN optimization techniques reduce latency and increase the throughput, allowing for faster access to data.
WAN acceleration uses WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs) to relieve congestion, improve transfer rates, and increase the responsiveness of applications. So, how does this work?
First, we need to understand the two key problems WOCs address:
To solve these issues, WOCs use the following techniques:
Area networks are expanding to include more applications, cloud and legacy technologies. Thus, optimizing the WAN is becoming necessary to ensure performance. Digital transformation is driving more traffic over the WAN, often affecting how business-critical applications perform.
The WAN starts out with latency issues to begin with, and adding to it the increasing traffic is a recipe for disaster. You have two options to solve this problem: you can purchase more bandwidth or you can implement WAN optimization. WAN acceleration was born from the need to improve the throughput of transmission control protocols (TCP) when bandwidth requirements are larger than its availability.
WAN optimization tools and techniques accelerate the traffic between applications by applying techniques to reduce the latency and the amount of data transferred at the same time through the WAN. As a result, it increases the bandwidth.
WAN optimization tools improve transfer times and optimize network performance through the following techniques:
WAN acceleration offers the possibility of improving WAN performance without having to invest in more hardware. The benefits of implementing a WAN optimization solution include:
