WAN Optimization

White Paper

Top 5 must-haves
to update your
WAN optimization
solution
Prepare your organization
to handle emerging
technology trends

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WAN Optimization

White Paper

The core value propositions for WAN optimization

have long been understood and are also well proven:
traditional solutions not only reduce bandwidth
demand and optimize network utilization to
substantially cut WAN costs, but also accelerate file
transfer, email and a wide range of other business
applications to greatly enhance the productivity
and user experience for remote and branch office
employees. However, these foundational capabilities
and the benefits they deliver are no longer sufficient.
Todays organizations are rapidly adopting virtualization, video, cloud computing and
other emerging technologies to reduce capital expenditures, improve operational
efficiencies and maintain a competitive edge. WAN optimization offerings need
to evolve to provide coverage for these and other business-driven IT trends and
initiatives. As a result, new criteria and capabilities that redefine an ideal WAN
optimization solution have emerged.
Organizations that fail to adjust their WAN optimization strategies and investments
accordingly are likely to encounter steadily deteriorating WAN performance, escalating
costs, the inability to achieve service level objectives and the need to purchase and
maintain multiple, separate products to fully account for the latest generation of IT
trends, technologies and service delivery models.

The WAN optimization solution every CIO (and CFO) knows and loves
Based on their ability to dramatically reduce bandwidth requirements for applications
transiting the WAN while utilizing available capacity more efficiently, WAN optimization
solutions have long been deployed to control, if not actually cut, WAN expenditures
for organizations of all types and sizes worldwide. Their ability to accelerate common
business applications has also been instrumental in delivering a better user experience
for branch office employees, in turn enabling consolidation and centralization of
application infrastructure along with all of their attendant benefits.
In a typical scenario, a pair of appliances one at each end of a given WAN
connection employs a collection of optimization mechanisms and technologies
such as adaptive TCP flow control, adaptive multi-level compression and intelligent
protocol acceleration. The results are typically outstanding and include the ability to:
Accelerate poorly performing applications by a factor of 20 or more to achieve
LAN-like response times
Restore/enhance user satisfaction and productivity for remote and branch
office employees
Reduce traffic load on WAN links by as much as 95 percent

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Cut existing WAN capacity and related expenditures, or at least defer paying for
additional capacity increases
Further consolidate applications and related infrastructure in centralized
datacenters without adversely impacting branch office employees
Achieve a positive ROI, frequently in less than six months

The WAN optimization solution every CIO (and CEO) needs now
It is virtually impossible to argue with the success of traditional WAN optimization
solutions. It is equally impossible, however, to dispute that businesses and their
computing environments have evolved considerably in recent years and, therefore,
that WAN optimization must likewise evolve to keep pace. Following are some
of significant business-driven IT trends and resulting use cases where WAN
optimization can make an important contribution:
Desktop, application and server virtualization initiatives
The growing consumption of video content
Continuing efforts to achieve greater operational efficiency, quickly resolve
application performance problems and maintain service levels (e.g., through
increased visibility) despite greater application and network complexity
Continuing efforts to consolidate, simplify and reduce the TCO of branch
office infrastructure
The growing adoption of cloud services and steady migration to enterprise
cloud networks
The following sections discuss each of these scenarios in greater detail, while also
identifying their impact on WAN optimization solutions and the new capabilities
required to support them.

Maximizing returns on virtualization investments

Todays organizations are steadily embracing desktop and application virtualization
to simplify IT operations and reduce desktop TCO while improving the security
and flexibility with which essential services are provided to their employees. To
fully realize these benefits, organizations need to make sure employees experience
performance and response times comparable to those of traditional, localized
PC sessions. Otherwise, employees will simply circumvent the new virtualization
solutions in favor of legacy approaches, or even worse, a collection of one-off,
consumer-grade solutions that are beyond ITs visibility and control.
The main challenge lies with remote and branch office employees, where intervening
WAN connections have the potential to increase application and file load times from
seconds to minutes and make highly interactive applications and tasks downright
intolerable. WAN optimization solutions can easily address these problems, but they
should ideally be virtualization aware to ensure a maximum degree of effectiveness.
Specific features and functions to look for include:

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The ability to decrypt packet flows and parse associated virtualization protocols
to obtain visibility both within and across individual user sessions
The ability to distinguish discrete workflows within each session so that, for
example, interactive traffic such as screen refreshes and mouse movements can
be given preference over traffic associated with file downloads or printing
Compression and caching mechanisms designed specifically to optimize
communication of mouse movements, keyboard entries and screen updates
Coverage for multiple virtualization solutions
Of course, most organizations are also intent on maximizing the use of server
virtualization technology to consolidate server hardware and obtain greater flexibility
when scaling supported workloads. Accordingly, modern WAN optimizers must be
deployable as virtual appliances running on popular hypervisor platforms. In addition,
physical and virtual appliance versions should share the same code base to guarantee
feature-function consistency and minimize operational management differences.

Riding the video tidal wave

The generation and consumption of video content are clearly on the rise. In fact,
Gartner has forecast that by 2016, large companies will stream more than 16
hours of video per worker, per month.1 The reason is simple: whether it is used
for training, marketing or routine collaboration, video provides a richer and more
compelling experience than commonly available alternatives (i.e., print, chat or
audio-only interactions).
However, video places considerable demands on an organizations network.
Streaming even a low-quality video can consume several hundred kilobits per
second, while HD video typically requires up to several megabits per second. A
single video session can eat up a large percentage of the bandwidth available
to a branch office. When multiple employees consume the same or different
video content at the same time, the result is typically a poor viewing experience
and significantly slower response times for other business-critical applications
attempting to communicate over the same links.
Once again, this is a situation where WAN optimizers can help particularly if core
optimization features are supplemented with video-specific quality of service (QoS),
caching and compression capabilities.
Video QoS. To ensure the best possible video experience without adversely
impacting other essential applications, accurate identification and classification
of video content must be combined with the ability to set and enforce granular
prioritization and traffic-shaping policies.
Video caching. The solution should include the ability to locally cache and stream
video content originally obtained from the corporate datacenter, Internet or other
sources. Caching allows subsequent requests for the same content to be filled much
faster and without repeatedly burdening the WAN. Related features to look for include
support for popular video codecs and formats, as well as the ability to:

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Selectively enable/disable caching for specific video content sites or servers

Control the minimum/maximum size of video objects to be cached
Establish granular policies for content refresh and/or currency checks

The Benefits of Video Caching

48X faster download

300MB

File size

46X faster download

200MB

Cache Hit

45X

Cache Miss

100MB

Caching Disabled

46X
10MB

50

100

150

200

250

300

Time to Download video file (seconds)

Network conditions: 10Mbps WAN link, 50ms RTT, 0.01% Loss

Figure 1: Reduction of download time by enabling video caching on Citrix CloudBridge 2000

Video compression. For symmetric implementations (where there is an optimizer

at either end of the link), block-level pattern-matching algorithms can eliminate the
need to transmit duplicate elements of video content over the WAN. Compared to
caching, which only works when there are repeated requests for the same video
content, compression benefits the initial transmission of a video and when content is
requested only once.

Countering complexity with in-Depth visibility and granular control

Virtualization technologies and video content are just the tip of the iceberg.
Todays IT departments must manage and ensure the performance of countless
other applications and initiatives from social media, VoIP, big data analytics and
increasingly sophisticated web applications to the growing adoption of public cloud
services, hybrid cloud implementations and even software-defined networking.
The result is a greater need for in-depth visibility and granular control over what
is happening on the WAN. Put another way, automatically reducing bandwidth
consumption and enhancing application performance over the WAN are no longer
sufficient. IT administrators also require tools and capabilities to proactively uncover
impending issues, quickly troubleshoot reported problems and conduct advanced
analysis to reveal additional ways to optimize network and application performance.

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Related features that are now essential to maximize solution effectiveness include:
Configurable dashboards for actively monitoring network usage, congestion
and delays
The ability to drill into summary-level information to obtain additional layers of detail
Granular service identification, prioritization and traffic shaping that enable
adaptive allocation of bandwidth consistent with business priorities and service
level commitments
Comprehensive reporting functionality that enables both real-time and historical
insight into the full range of available application performance and usage data
The ability to reveal performance and usage at the level of individual applications
and users and to supply associated data to specialized third-party tools (such as
Splunk) for consolidated reporting and advanced analysis
Out-of-the-box coverage for hundreds of common applications, supplemented
by the ability to define and fully manage custom applications and services
In addition, all WAN optimization functionality should preserve TCP/IP header
information, VLAN tags and QoS markings often used by other networking
components such as routers, switches, firewalls and load balancers for
performance, security and other traffic management purposes.

Simplifying and consolidating branch Office infrastructure

As their branch offices proliferate to support geographic expansion and maintain
close physical proximity to customers and partners, organizations are under
pressure to simplify branch infrastructure and reduce capital and operating
expenditures. WAN optimization supports these objectives first and foremost by
enabling IT to serve many applications to branch employees from highly efficient,
consolidated data centers.
An opportunity also exists for WAN optimizers to help consolidate applications and
services that need to be deployed locally. For example, incorporating an integral
Windows Server into the WAN optimizer allows essential branch office networking
services such as file access, printing, DHCP, DNS and WINS to be implemented
without the need for a separate, dedicated server. By setting up a local, read-only
domain controller, organizations can maintain employee productivity in the event
centralized directory services become inaccessible. With an integrated Windows
Server, other applications and helpful utilities could similarly be deployed on the
same physical device.

Accelerating and connecting cloud-based services

Cloud delivery models public, private and hybrid are transforming todays
businesses by providing highly agile, scalable, resilient and cost-effective delivery of
IT services. WAN optimization has the potential to help in two distinct ways: (1) by
enabling a secure, optimized bridge for transferring workloads and data between the

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WAN Optimization

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primary datacenter and the cloud (or an alternate datacenter); and (2) by optimizing
delivery of cloud-hosted applications and services to employees, wherever they are
located. Features and capabilities essential to these goals include:
Secure connectivity to clouds such that all data transfers take place over a
strongly encrypted connection
Transparent connectivity to clouds so the cloud network becomes a seamless
extension of the enterprise datacenter network (thereby minimizing the need for
network and application configuration changes)
Pre-integration with clouds making configuration of connections to popular
cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure and
deploying WAN optimizer instances are both simple, straightforward exercises
WAN optimization solutions that incorporate such capabilities help unleash the
power of the public cloud by allowing enterprises to augment their datacenters with
the infinite capacity and elastic efficiency of this game-changing delivery model.

Conclusion
Whether your organization has deployed WAN optimization or not, it is time to look at
how the right solution can make a big difference for the latest generation of businessdriven IT trends and initiatives. With a unified platform that extends core application
acceleration and bandwidth reduction capabilities with in-depth visibility and coverage
for new, high-profile use cases such as virtualization, video consumption and cloud
computing organizations can maximize gains while avoiding the need to invest in
multiple, separate solutions.
Anyone interested in learning more about the capabilities of a modern, full-featured
WAN optimization solution should consider Citrix CloudBridge. CloudBridge is
a proven network optimization and application delivery solution. It allows you
to optimize WAN bandwidth utilization while providing secure network access
between branches, data centers mobile workers and the cloud. As the only WAN
optimization solution with integrated, secure and transparent cloud connectivity,
CloudBridge allows enterprises to augment their data centers with the infinite
capacity and elastic efficiency provided by public clouds, while also simplifying
branch office networks without sacrificing service delivery quality and performance.
For information on how CloudBridge delivers a unified WAN optimization and cloud
connectivity solution, please visit www.citrix.com/cloudbridge.

Reference
1. MarketScope for Video Content Management and Delivery, Gartner, April 13, 2012.

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