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Application Acceleration
Application acceleration is a solution for achieving higher data throughput for a given bandwidth. It reduces latency and increases throughput of TCP applications, including HTTP, file transfers and remote backups. |
What is Application Acceleration used for?
Application acceleration is used to obtain greater data throughput without the need to upgrade any physical link, WAN bandwidth or network topology. It significantly enhances application response over existing infrastructure. |
Why is Application Acceleration important for WAN optimization?
- Application acceleration offers a cost effective alternative to upgrading WAN bandwidth and network infrastructure. It ensures businesses obtain the best return on investment on existing infrastructure.
- Increasing the size of the pipe has little impact in helping environments which consolidate servers. Throwing bandwidth at the problem may only resolve the issues up to a certain point. At this point, only application acceleration can further enhance application performance.
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How does Application Acceleration work?
Application Acceleration works by pattern matching and remembering repetitious data streams. It only needs to transmit the delta (changes) to the packets across the WAN. |
| Application Acceleration and Traffic Management technologies greatly enhance the user access experience by offering LAN-like performance for the WAN. The Traffic Management technologies firstly help you accurately understand how applications are being used, their performance over time, network use patterns and where the point of congestions are. Secondly, the policy based QoS assigns the right amount of resource to each application and maintains a fair use policy of the infrastructure, thereby eliminating congestion. The Application Acceleration technologies work further to improve response times and experience by eliminating application chattiness, aggregating many small packets into big ones and storing repetitive network patterns for local delivery (WAN memory). |
Compression |
Performs cross-stream data compression reducing packet size. The reduced packet sizes are then aggregated before transmission
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| WAN memory |
Identifies and memorizes repetitive network data patterns. Only changes to data are sent across the WAN, greatly enhancing application response times and eliminating transmission of repetitive data patterns. WAN memory operates on network streams and is application independent.
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| Link Utilization |
Increase throughput of TCP traffic over high bandwidth and/or high latency links by putting more data on the wire. Link Utilization uses TCP window scaling to manipulate window sizes to allow better utilization of links.
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| Packet Aggregation |
Send many small packets as one large packet to reduce header overhead. The small packets resulting from compression and caching, are aggregated to further enhance the overall application performance.
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| Flow Optimization |
Improve TCP transmission efficiency for high latency networks and eliminate retransmission of repeated data segments. Flow Optimization helps TCP recover quickly after packet loss. |
| Application Pipeline |
Performs latency and response time optimization through smart round trip elimination. Application Pipeline also enables accelerated connection establishment, reducing the time before application data can be sent |
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In what scenarios is Application Acceleration most useful?
Application acceleration is most useful in networks where applications are experiencing problems with high latency. |
For example: |
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WANs that cannot support applications performance due to latency or traffic load including inter-continental and satellite links |
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Sites separated by large geographical distances |
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Environments with unpredictable performance |
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Remote Disaster Recovery environments where large data backups are done overnight |
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Environments that are consolidating server infrastructure into central location and need to ensure WAN users have satisfactory application response times. |
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| What are the key benefits of Application Acceleration? |
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Low cost alternative to expensive bandwidth and network upgrades. |
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Achieve highest link utilization in lossy and congested links. |
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Significantly reduced latency for multiple gets and repetitive data. |
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Improve application response times and reduce unnecessary overheads. |
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Eliminate re-transmission of repeated data segments. |
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Reduce packet header overhead by aggregating smaller packets. |
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What applications can be accelerated with AA?
All TCP applications can be accelerated including SAP, MS Exchange, HTTP, Windows File and Print, Lotus Notes, etc.
As cross-stream compression is employed some applications can be further accelerated if the data sent is compressible. |
WAN optimization
WAN optimization seek to accelerate a broad range of applications accessed by distributed enterprise users via eliminating redundant transmissions, staging data in local caches, compressing and prioritizing data, and streamlining chatty protocols (e.g., CIFS).
WAN Optimization is a superset of WAFS in that it also addresses: |
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SSL-encrypted ASP and Intranet applications |
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Multimedia e-learning applications
Component techniques of WAN Optimization include WAFS, CIFS proxy, HTTPS Proxy, media multicasting, Web caching and bandwidth management.
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