The distributed enterprise — designed to connect branch offices and mobile workers with central headquarters — often places a severe strain on the technology infrastructure. File and application servers deployed to support remote locations increase management overhead and complicate data backup. Decentralized storage and lax branch office security threaten sensitive corporate data.

Many organizations seek to solve these problems by consolidating applications and data into centralized data centers, relying upon WANs to connect users and systems across locations. But increasingly complex applications and growing file sizes have caused network congestion and serious performance problems — particularly on far-flung WAN links. Increased latency and poor application response times threaten branch office and remote worker productivity.

FusionStorm is helping clients address this critical issue through the use of optimization tools that dramatically improve WAN performance. By implementing integrated branch-office solutions that accelerate the performance of any TCP-based application across the WAN, FusionStorm has helped clients improve data throughput, application response and backup times and enable the consolidation of the branch office server, storage and backup infrastructure for easier management and lower cost.

“IT organizations are looking for ways to improve the delivery and support of applications using their existing WAN infrastructures,” said Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm. “We can help customers boost WAN performance without adding more bandwidth or significantly overhauling their networks.”

In the Fast Lane

Key to FusionStorm’s approach is Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), a comprehensive and scalable branch-office solution that provides WAN optimization, application acceleration and Wide-Area File Services (WAFS) in one easy-to-deploy solution. Combined with Cisco Application Networking Services, Cisco WAAS is designed to scale to support thousands of branch offices and up to millions of TCP connections with up to 16Gbps performance in a fully scaled, load-balanced deployment. It is completely transparent to customers’ existing networks and helps enable a smooth integration with pre-established network security and WAN traffic policies.

“Cisco WAAS is an integrated, next-generation branch-office solution that enables companies to centralize shared resources within the data center while ensuring that remote employees continue to have highly reliable, high-performance access to business-critical corporate applications and data,” said Conroy. “FusionStorm’s certified and experienced Cisco engineers can help customers leverage this state-of-the-art technology to accelerate application and file performance, and optimize WAN bandwidth utilization.”

Cisco WAAS incorporates several industry-leading application acceleration, WAFS and WAN optimization techniques, including compression, redundancy elimination, transport optimizations, caching and content distribution. WAFS is designed to consolidate storage, file servers, print servers and backup devices from branch offices into the data center, while still giving all connected locations fast and easy access to files and applications. WAN optimization works at the packet level by compressing data streams, monitoring traffic flows, prioritizing network traffic and managing applications from a protocol perspective.

“The optimized branch office delivers many key benefits, including reduced power consumption and management costs,” Conroy said. “Resource centralization also improves security and data protection.”

WAN Roadmap

Cisco WAAS is designed for transparent integration with enterprises’ IP networks and to work seamlessly with the full suite of Cisco IOS services and functionality. This helps ensure that IT managers can maintain end-to-end visibility, monitoring, firewall security policies and quality of service (QoS) capabilities within their networks, without requiring any changes to clients or servers. In addition, Cisco WAAS’ device auto-discovery capability speeds deployment into any network topology and does not require configuring and maintaining separate overlay networks.

The WAAS solution is a part of Cisco’s Application Networking Services, a portfolio of application-aware networking products that enhance the scalability, availability, security and performance of data and applications from the data center to branch offices and remote users. Cisco ANS also includes:

• Application Control Engine (ACE), which integrates server load balancing, application security and unique virtual partitioning capabilities for easier application infrastructure management and deployment

•  Application Velocity System (AVS), which accelerates and secures Internet-facing applications
  

•  Application and Content Networking System (ACNS), which effectively delivers video to remote branches

Cisco offers a network module for running WAAS software on the Cisco integrated services router (ISR). For added ease of implementation across the enterprise, the Cisco WAAS solution is also offered as a stand-alone appliance.

“Enterprises are increasingly attempting to centralize and consolidate their applications and data in order to comply with government regulations and simplify branch IT operations. A major obstacle is the impact of latency, limited bandwidth and network packet loss on application performance across the WAN,” Conroy said. “Cisco WAAS provides enterprises with an easy way to consolidate distributed branch servers, storage and backup infrastructure while ensuring high application performance to end-users. In addition, by being transparently integrated into enterprise networks, Cisco WAAS enables customers to extend the benefits from their investments in Cisco WAN infrastructure.”