Some of them are more than 8 hours' travel time away from the department's Tahoe headquarters location. Though that remoteness serves as an additional barrier against escape, the distances involved posed interesting challenges to the department's key homegrown inmate tracking system.
A batch-oriented system with no real-time data interface, its developer is no longer available, which makes internal code changes impractical. Thanks to its age and old-fashioned design, this inmate tracking system presented numerous deficiencies. Thus, the department chose to replace it using a centralized real-time management system purchased from Syscon Justice Systems that features a Web-based interface accessible from any Internet connection. The new software handles all basic inmate operations, such as calculating sentences, tracking funds held in trust for inmates, and monitoring inmate location at all times.
Unfortunately, the Syscon program was not developed to take WAN latency issues into account. Though it performs adequately on a LAN, across slower WAN links, individual pages took nearly a full minute to load and display data.
For sites not yet equipped with T1 lines, this could involve substantial added expense and even then, T1 connections were simply not available to the most remote of these sites. Application-specific WAN optimization came to the rescue here. An appliance was installed near the WAN gateway at each location to manage traffic on each link. This led to substantial improvements in throughput, while caching enabled load times to decrease to around 5 seconds in most cases after initial page loads had occurred.
In addition, the Nevada Department of Corrections found itself able to manage all Internet access at all of its sites, and to control and groom Internet access. As a nice side effect, WAN optimization eliminated unnecessary WAN traffic, thereby freeing additional bandwidth for legitimate users and applications. With 20 WAN optimization appliances at HQ and remote locations, implementation took some time and effort. The department had to develop access and security policies for the appliances to enforce, and they had to be tuned to provide an optimal mix of functions to meet user needs.
Though this involves a distance halfway around the globe, communications between both campuses are critical: the majority of the teaching staff and instructional resources are housed in Edinburg, but students and staff on the Dubai campus need ready access to them.
To meet its instructional needs, Heriot-Watt has implemented a Virtual Learning Environment VLE that permits inter-campus sharing of educational materials and online interactive tools that students share with instructors and each other. Unfortunately, the WAN link in use provides only limited bandwidth so that data volume is limited and is subject to high latency, which poses severe problems for streaming or near realtime applications such as voice and video.
This combination of hurdles made VLE problematic between the two campuses, where page load times might easily run as high as 20 seconds, and where a load of more than half a dozen active users would bog down the link sufficiently to interrupt communications. Because of the distance between the two campuses, Heriot-Watt decided that a bandwidth upgrade was too expensive to afford and too difficult to implement.
Even then, overall latency would still have remained fairly high owing to use of long-haul satellite links. Careful implementation of a pair of WAN optimization appliances with application proxy capabilities enabled the university to implement its VLE across that link.
A combination of WAN optimization techniques that included compression, object and byte caching, and traffic prioritization, along with application protocol optimization, allowed Heriot-Watt to make use of video-based e-learning technology across the WAN link as well.
Page load times declined from nearly 20 seconds to around 1 second, and delivered significant performance boosts to VLE and email communications. The ability for students and staff on both campuses to access the same learning materials at nearly the same instant also means the university can offer virtual classes to students on both campuses at the same time.
Because of application and file-level caching, on-demand video e-learning modules can be transported across the WAN during non-peak hours, and then stored locally on both campuses. The university can also offer live video feeds across the WAN by sending a single video stream, then splitting that feed into as many individual streams as are needed on each campus.
This has enabled numerous e-learning pilots, which the university had hitherto considered infeasible. Heriot-Watt can move optimized, secure traffic related to administrative applications across the WAN link. This lets the university make much better use of available bandwidth, yet still make use of critical applications as they're needed.
Also, only traffic that needs to move between Dubai and Edinburgh traverses the WAN link, as both WAN optimization devices can provide Web security for local Internet connections as well as block against malware and other malicious threats locally. Likewise, these appliances can impose security and allowable use policies on the Internet link to block or limit unwanted or inappropriate applications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing.
Networx Australia is a managed service provider that works with Australian enterprises and organizations. It offers its clients Internet access, WAN connectivity, and security solutions for all kinds of business needs. Today's managed service environment in Australia is highly competitive so that service providers are continually on the lookout for ways and means to differentiate themselves and to inspire customer loyalty and retention.
To that end, Networx Australia chose to provide WAN optimization services to its customers to accelerate application and content delivery without increasing—and in many cases, decreasing— bandwidth consumption.
For many of its customers, Networx Australia provides the WAN infrastructure between their own headquarters' centralized data centers and branch offices. End users in the branch locations need access to data, applications, and services housed in the data center but want to obtain LANgrade performance and response time when doing so.
Prior to deployment of its WAN optimization devices, many branch users experienced excessive network latencies to the point where applications ran painfully slowly or did not even work at all.
Adding bandwidth can't completely address such problems, but WAN optimization helped bring latency levels under control and enabled branch users to increase their productivity while speeding overall response time and usability. Networx Australia's use of WAN optimization devices also enabled them to improve the security as well as the performance of their WAN infrastructure.
In addition to accelerating application access and reducing network latency, these devices provided a means whereby companies could look to Networx Australia to provide malware protection, impose URL filters to block access to inappropriate or disallowed sites and content, and prohibit use of unwanted or unsafe applications that might be illegal, unauthorized, unlicensed, or not related to normal workaday use such as peer-to-peer music or video access, BitTorrent downloads, and other "personal use" protocols or services not needed on business networks.
By deploying WAN optimization devices at customer branch offices and at their data centers, Networx Australia was able to accelerate application and content delivery at the same time it improved Web security and network controls. Customers report improved behavior and usability of approved distributed applications and file services, more overall available bandwidth, and improved application experiences for end users. Behind the scenes, Networx Australia also was able to reduce its own operational costs, thanks to more efficient use of its WAN infrastructure, and to improve customer loyalty and retention.
Caching technology and protocol optimization have enabled customers to speed CIFS file transfers by factors of up to times. The same security protections that customers enjoy in their data centers and branch offices also benefit Networx Australia, with increased protection against malware and unauthorized or unwanted applications. Traffic management and reductions from elimination or throttling of unauthorized programs and services has also let Networx Australia make better use of its WAN infrastructure, and improve its overall profitability without increasing operation costs.
Across the board, introducing WAN optimization has been a win-win for both the provider and its customers, and has helped them to develop and retain a growing and satisfied customer base.
Companies and organizations seeking to optimize use of existing WAN links, and to maximize their ROI on new WAN links, will find that in addition to increasing the utility of bandwidth consumed, WAN optimization devices offer improved security, increased control, and more effective use of key applications through appropriate proxy deployments.
Many buyers discover to their delight that the payback period for investments in WAN optimization are shorter than originally projected because increased usability, improved response time, and better application control often leads to higher-than-projected growth in WAN usage and unexpected productivity gains.
Any company or organization that uses WAN links for regular, ongoing communications will find it worthwhile to contemplate, and probably to implement, some kind of WAN optimization strategy. Enterprise IT Management.
Benefits of an Improved Application Infrastructure The benefits of proxies and WAN optimization devices in the enterprise network landscape are numerous. Holistic View of Entire Application Delivery Environment The primary approach to acquiring a complete knowledge of the application delivery environment is to ascertain all traffic types and content that passes through some central or shared access point.
Observation of Application and User Pairings WAN optimization device presence permits IT staff to monitor and observe interactions between end users complete with contextual content and application data.
Organizational Priority and Policy Compliance Preservation of confidentiality, privacy, and security are reasonable expectations of any WAN accelerator that is likely to pass and process sensitive or proprietary data and documents. Mobile and Roving User Management Additionally, a WAN optimization device provides the operational oversight needed to manage roving or mobile users. Application Awareness and Real-Time Results WAN accelerators capable of handling applications and protocols directly can deliver better optimization than those that look only at traffic at the packet, byte, or bit level.
Symbolic Dictionaries and Sent References WAN optimization devices can use local symbol dictionaries and effect quick, efficient pattern lookups to eliminate redundant transmission of objects or data sequences see Figure 4. LAN-Side Optimization Impacts WAN Delivery LAN-side optimization handling accounts for network acknowledgements, maintains short response times, and uses shared symbol or content dictionaries to exchange large amounts of information by reference rather than by outright exchange.
The presence of WAN optimization devices at the LAN to WAN transition point also maintains consistency and helps synchronize both ends of a conversation quickly and efficiently Proxies and Tunneling The entire problem with managing and maintaining globally, regionally, or territorially disparate networks is in finding a cohesive, comprehensive manner to unify diverse and mostly incompatible applications and protocols.
Special Considerations for Disaster Recovery WAN links also service disaster recovery procedures and processes, so there are special requirements for deploying WAN optimization in such environments.
At the forefront of the evaluation process reside a few key principles: Know your applications and protocols—Observe how much traffic generates from replication processes, what and when peak loads occur, and the duration of data in transit between points. Know your limits—Quantify traffic flow across the network to gauge how WAN optimization devices appropriately handle the volume.
The WAN's inherent latency issues and the cost of network bandwidth are major issues for businesses right now. The two ways to address this need for greater bandwidth are to purchase more or use what you already have more effectively through WAN optimization. For many companies, WAN optimization can bring significant improvements to business operations. Now that you have a little more information on how to maximize your IT infrastructure performance with WAN optimization, I hope you will take my recommendation on incorporating WAN optimization into your enterprise wireless network solution.
If you need help figuring out the details or have any questions, feel free to contact us here. At SecurEdge, we are experts in building completely secure wireless networks. We incorporate the latest in next generation security and WAN performance management tools for complete WAN optimization. We also have some free resources on our site we hope you find them useful. Good luck! However, in most cases, additional performance is still required for specific applications or geographically remote locations.
They are complementary when deployed together. The time it takes for information to go from sender to receiver and back is referred to as network latency. As the distance between locations increases over the WAN, especially for remote international sites with low speed transport or where there are long backhauls, performance degrades for some applications.
This has less to do with the available bandwidth and more to do with the time it takes to send and receive data packets over distance and the number of times data must be re-transmitted. When branch offices are deployed as part of a broadband or hybrid WAN, enterprises may require higher performance for specific latency-sensitive or data-intensive applications or locations, for example, file transfers or disaster recovery.
This granularity enables enterprises to decide which applications to optimize along with the specific locations where the optimization is to be applied, thereby lowering the total cost of WAN optimization. It is embedded within the same EdgeConnect software image, and it is not a separate, service-chained virtual network function or physical appliance.
0コメント