The UAE and the Middle East has excellent internet connectivity. However, one issue companies always grapple with is the costs associated with these services. With this in mind then, it’s not surprising that we are often asked about WAN optimizing products.
What is WAN Optimization?
WAN optimization reduces the amount of traffic sent across the WAN (Wide Area Network that might connect your branches) and delivers information locally whenever possible (meaning information is fast!). This improves the costs associated with application delivery – from staffing, infrastructure and facility costs to expenditures in application software and WAN bandwidth.
In addition, WAN optimization protects investments in business critical applications by ensuring that they meet end user performance objectives, and it minimizes risk of exposure by improving the performance and reliability of data backup, replication and disaster recovery.
How can WAN Optimization benefit you business?
- Reduce Bandwidth Expenditures - Effectively change a 128k link to a 1MB link
- Consolidate Data Centers – Bandwidth speeds and costs often mean each country location needs its own datacenter – WAN optimization makes running one regional central Datacenter feasible
- Backup and Recover More Data - WAN acceleration can be essential to backup and disaster recovery plans. We find some customers simply cannot get enough data across their WAN to backup effectively to have a quickly available DR solution
- Eliminate Point Products - Eliminating standalone solutions for IPSec and Quality of Service (QoS). A good WAN optimization product has these features come standard, and more importantly, are integrated with the company's leading WAN optimization technology.
We usually see the WAN Optimization products we sell pay for themselves in 6 months or less!
At this point we should say we are a partner for Silverpeak, a product we believe is best of class for WAN Optimization. We are so confident about Silverpeak WAN optimization what we often install this free for customers and allow them to run a POC (proof of concept), if they are happy with the results (100% have been so far) then they simply pay for it and we leave it in running.
Recently we came across a client who had a backlog of 167hours of traffic trying to replicate across a 30MB WAN link from their Primary to their Disaster Recovery Facility. They were considering upgrading their MPLS link from 30MB to 100MB in the hope their replication would start functioning properly. We suggested they try Silverpeak WAN Optimization and 14 hours after being installed – their backlog was reduced to 0. That’s 167 hours of backlog cleared in 14 hours – without upgrading the link (which probably would not have solved the issue). The return of investment in this case was less then 6 months when compared to paying for a bigger link.
Download the BIOS WAN Appliance Comparison Chart:
Download our white paper on WAN Optimization
