The Wide-area Data Services solution is sometimes confused with other application acceleration products. With so many vendors claiming to provide “application acceleration” products, it is important to understand different approaches and their limitations.

Despite years of innovations in various areas of WAN performance, the throughput of applications over WANs has historically been quite poor. Some approaches focus on bandwidth expansion, some optimize specific protocols, some attack the problem through caching, and others by prioritizing traffic. While compression, caching, QoS, WAFS, and other technologies have their place, until now no vendor has provided a fully-integrated solution that addresses the multiple root-causes of poor application performance.

Only Riverbed delivers a complete solution to wide area networking problems, by enabling Wide-area Data Services (WDS). Riverbed addresses all the key factors that slow application performance over WANs: high latency, limited bandwidth, “chatty” transport protocols, and even “chattier” applications.

Learn more about any of these common approaches to application acceleration

	Approach	Limitation(s)
WAFS	Stores files locally in order to avoid requests going across the WAN	Only supports files and file sharing Consistency and security problems
Compression	Applies algorithms to data in order to decrease the volume of data moving across the WAN.	Provides limited bandwidth savings Does not address transport or application protocol inefficiencies
Protocol Optimization	Modifies the behavior of TCP across the enterprise WAN	Limited performance gains Very little bandwidth reduction
Caching	Stores local copies of files or objects so requests can be served locally	Generally only works for one application Increases the complexity of network infrastructure Subject to consistency problems Subject to security problems
Web Application Acceleration	Offloads requests from a web server by storing commonly requested objects on another server	Only works for Web-based applications

Beware the Bolt-on Approach

As vendors have realized that the above approaches don’t meet enterprise needs, they have tried to partner with other companies or acquire other technologies in order to claim greater functionality. The problem with this approach, however, is that these combined products often still have limited functionality and can be incredibly complex to manage. Furthermore, these vendors face the challenge of integrating multiple disparate architectures, leading to a haphazard, inconsistent approach to accelerating applications.

Look Beyond the Standard Checklist

With some vendors incrementally adding functionality, it is seemingly getting harder to differentiate one application acceleration provider from another. In order to do so, you can use a few simple criteria:

• How fast can the product accelerate the applications that you care about the most? Don’t let vendors tell you what applications are the most important; you should tell them.
• Go beyond the top-level check. Vendors like to claim they have ‘fully functional’ features when they often have just scratched the surface. For example, consider CIFS protocol acceleration. If a vendor says they have CIFS acceleration, explore further and understand what they mean by that: Can they accelerate folder copying as well as file copying? Can they accelerate browsing as well as file reads? What about accelerating CIFS from within Microsoft Office applications? And what about accelerating CIFS from within non-Microsoft applications?
• How easy is it to deploy the product? Make sure vendors have designed in functionality such as transparent deployment, auto-discovery, and central management so that you don’t have to spend significant amounts of time monitoring your acceleration devices.