LAN Performance Hundreds of Miles Away

February 25th, 2010 by Jason B.

As companies are looking to cut costs, many ponder moving their infrastructure to a managed hosting environment rather than maintaining it themselves. Saving money is always an appealing option to any CEO, but the first questions always raised are, “How will our infrastructure respond if it is a hundred of miles away? Will our file sharing performance be hurt due it not being on the local LAN?”

These are all very good concerns and, in some cases, can be deal breakers for the company. But, there is help out there, and the solution is proven and being praised by many. That solution is Cisco WAAS.

Cisco WAAS, or Wide Area Application Services, allows you to centralize applications and storage in a managed host, while still maintaining LAN-like performance. And that is just the start of things!

WAAS allows you to:

Save money by not having to have dedicated floor space locally for a data center.
Not have data across many servers in many locations that is different everywhere.
More efficiently use WAN connections, and prevent unnecessary upgrades to those circuits.
Have the uptime and reliability for their servers that come with a Managed host, and not have to worry about issues like failures, MRO stock, support contracts etc.

Implementing WAAS is pretty straightforward. Depending on your exact needs, there are different models and implementation details, from a local module on an ISR router, to a full-fledged dedicated device. Here is how Cisco WAAS works the magic:

First, there are WAAS capable devices located in both locations. As I mentioned above, the model and type depend on needs and can be integrated seamlessly into your environment.

Second, they implement TFO, or Transport Flow Optimization. Cisco uses various tweaks, including window scaling, congestion management, and improved packet aggregation. By utilizing TFO, client experience faster acknowledgement and minimized perceived packet loss among others.

Third, they utilize 2 forms of compress: Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE) and Persistent LZ Compression.

Last, it uses Application specific acceleration to reduce the impact of chatty applications. It also eliminates passing redundant information, employing compression on all data, and optimizes TCP over the link.

Here are some of the Application specific acceleration techniques utilized by WAAS:

Read-ahead technology
Caching
Message Predictions
Content pre-positioning

There have been many case studies out there that have shown dramatic improvements in speed for files and such located hundreds of miles away. Here are some examples from Cisco:

Example 1: CAD file over T1, no WAAS, 5 minutes. Same file, with WAAS, couple seconds.
Example 2. 10MB Powerpoint. Over WAN, 5 minutes. With WAAS, 2 seconds.
Example 3: 5MB email, 10minutes without WAAS, 1 minute with WAAS.
Example 4: 250MB backup over WAN, more than 1 hour. With WAAS, 1 minute.

How could INetU work with you on this? If you already have a WAAS capable device in your location, we can help you set up one here, whether that be over a private MPLS link, or through your regular internet connection. Based on these sample tests centralizing your companies infrastructure at a managed host can be not only an economical advantage, but an efficient one, too.