In parallel with these consolidation and standardisation efforts, businesses want to make their applications more accessible. Giving users access to the full suite of corporate applications, all of the time, irrespective of their location, is now a necessity rather than a perk. The trend in flexible working clearly makes remote access a key issue.
The net result of this trend is that over 80% of all application users now access applications remotely . The applications are becoming more sophisticated and this often results in greater volumes of traffic being transferred over the network. The problem is that while these applications work fine over a Local Area Network (LAN), with the user typically in the same building as the application, the same applications may perform very poorly when accessed over a Wide Area Network (WAN). The user experience is that the application is slow to respond, or in the worst case, unusable. The primary goal of Application Optimisation (AO) is to improve this user experience. Given potential improvements of up to 500%, it is easy to see how this market is getting more and more attention from CIOs with an eye on productivity and the bottom line.
Application Optimisation is the name given to a category of technologies that optimise the performance of applications running over networks. Hence, AO is relevant to any application hosted in one location and accessed by remote clients, typically over a WAN.
The poor performance of network-based applications is typically due to insufficient bandwidth or excessive latency in the network. Increasing WAN bandwidth may be a partial solution but this is costly and takes time, and fails to address the latency issue. If a user is 1000km away from the data centre then no amount of bandwidth will overcome the inherent latency of the copper and fibre communications links.
IT managers are now finding that AO technologies offer an alternative to bandwidth upgrades and can resolve latency issues as well. The relative ease of deploying AO technologies in comparison with WAN bandwidth upgrades means this has become a very compelling solution for many businesses. Consider the impact to a business if the rollout of a critical application is delayed for many months whilst waiting for WAN bandwidth upgrades.
As well as improving the user experience, AO technologies can provide many other benefits including: WAN bandwidth savings, reduction in server workload, improved application availability, improved security and application performance monitoring.
When looking at the problem that AO is aimed at, it does seem like there are existing technologies that play in the same field. Technologies like Quality of Service (QoS), IP Multicast and Compression are a form of AO and they are used to enhance the operation of applications running over networks. However, those technologies operate at the packet level, performing prioritisation, replication and compression of individual packets.
In contrast, the new AO technologies are truly application-aware and operate at the message level, with capabilities to proxy sessions, look deep into messages which span several packets, perform message-level transformations and implement sophisticated protocol-level optimisations.
All of the application traffic requiring optimisation traverses the network between the client and server, therefore adding AO technologies to the network fabric appears perfectly logical.
In addition to being the best place to intercept application flows, network-based AO can offer other benefits, including boosted performance by using dedicated hardware. Using hardware-based AO technologies integrated into the network fabric means that servers are not burdened with additional software and AO services can be applied transparently without changes to applications or clients.
Deployment within the network fabric means that AO technologies are decoupled from individual applications and servers. This, combined with virtualisation capabilities, means the same AO infrastructure can be leveraged by many different applications running over the same network. This in turn results in improved efficiency, better utilisation and faster ROI for the AO infrastructure – in real terms, these can be up to 500% improvement in application response time for remote users, 90% reduction in WAN bandwidth utilisation, 80% reduction in server workload, and economies related to a reduced need for WAN bandwidth upgrades.
As the capability of routers and switches increases, many AO technologies that were previously only available in standalone appliances are now being integrated into networking hardware. This tight integration of functionality means that AO services can be deployed quickly and managed more easily.
Businesses are going through a process of data centre consolidation and application standardisation in order to realise significant total cost of ownership savings and meet their business objectives. These changes can create performance problems that result in users experiencing slow application response times. Fortunately a new breed of network-based AO technologies is available to solve the bandwidth and latency issues affecting networked applications. IT managers are now successfully using these AO technologies to solve application performance issues and offer a highly cost-effective alternative to WAN bandwidth upgrades.
What benefits can I expect from Application Optimisation?
The performance gains obviously vary according to application traffic profile and WAN bandwidth but these are the sort of figures often quoted for web-based business applications, being accessed over the WAN:
• 2x – 5x improvement in application response time for remote users
• Up to 90% reduction in WAN bandwidth utilisation
• Up to 80% reduction in server workload
As a result of these gains expensive WAN bandwidth upgrades can often be avoided and new applications can be rolled out on or ahead of schedule.
How do Application Optimisation technologies work?
Application Optimisation technologies are delivered by two categories of device which the Analyst community terms as Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) and WAN Optimisation Controllers (WOC). Networking vendors will have their own unique product names but the products broadly fit into one of these two categories:
Application Delivery Controllers are deployed in the data centre, typically positioned in front of the Web or Application server farm. They operate transparently without any modification to the application or the client. Application Delivery Controllers can perform some or all of the following functions:
Server Load Balancing – to connect clients to the best server based on server health, server load and application availability. This allows the creation of highly reliable and scalable application environments.
TCP connection multiplexing – reduces workload on servers by multiplexing many client sessions onto persistent TCP connections to servers.
SSL Offload – terminates SSL sessions from clients. This reduces the workload on application servers and streamlines the management of SSL certificates. This also enhances Server Load Balancing and Intrusion Detection capabilities through greater visibility into application data.
Caching – reduces workload on servers by serving commonly accessed content to clients and dynamically manages client’s browser cache to improve response time.
Compression – improves response time and reduces WAN utilisation by dynamically compressing content before it is sent to the client’s browser.
Request Aggregation – overcomes network latency and improves response time by aggregating application data and reducing the number of TCP/IP round trips to the client.
Delta Encoding – improves response time and reduces WAN utilisation by only sending page changes to the client’s browser.
Application Layer Firewalling – granular inspection of web traffic to identify individual applications running over HTTP.
WAN Optimisation Controllers are deployed in the branch office, attached to the branch LAN or integrated into the branch router. WAN Optimisation Controllers can perform some or all of the following functions:
Wide Area File Services – optimises file access protocols and provides local file storage to allow branch file and print services to be centralised to the data centre, without impacting the user experience for read or write access. Centralisation of file and print services allows businesses to realise significant TCO savings.
Web Caching – improves response time of browser-based applications by storing frequently accessed content. Also reduces WAN utilisation.
Software and File Distribution – managed pre-positioning of software, documents and media files dramatically reduces download times for branch users.
SSL Termination – allows the benefits of caching and pre-positioning of content to be extended to SSL encrypted content.
Video Streaming – extends streaming video services to branch users, for corporate communications and e-learning.
Secure Content Management – applies security policies to branch Internet usage through the integration of content filtering software.
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