Enterprise WAN Optimization >

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1 White Paper Enterprise WAN Optimization > Delivering faster applications to any user, anywhere

2 An integrated approach to accelerating network applications Businesses everywhere are becoming increasingly decentralized and mobile. To provide a headquarters work experience anytime, anywhere, IT organizations like yours must deliver consistently reliable application performance across the WAN. To achieve this goal, you need solutions that take a holistic approach to application visibility, acceleration and security. Accelerating business-critical applications requires more than applying a few techniques to control performance problems. You have to understand the performance requirements of several application types and use the appropriate technology to address a broad spectrum of applications and architectures. Just as important, you have to block or mitigate malicious or non-essential network traffic, such as Web ads and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, which can consume nearly 50 percent of your bandwidth. The Application Delivery Network: Driving the future of enterprise information delivery An Application Delivery Network (ADN) infrastructure helps you optimize and secure the flow of information to any user, anywhere across your distributed enterprise. The ADN provides the comprehensive intelligent network control you need to improve application visibility, acceleration and security with these core capabilities: Application Performance Monitoring, WAN Optimization and Secure Web Gateway technologies. As a result, the ADN helps you: -> See applications and users and how they behave on the network, and troubleshoot performance issues. -> Accelerate mission-critical applications, streaming video, SSL and other enterprise traffic. -> Secure against malware, data leaks and performance degradation. -> Enable a highly efficient and productive end-to-end user experience. This white paper looks at the specific issues behind application performance problems and how to resolve them within an ADN environment. It explores how important acceleration technologies such as bandwidth management, compression, protocol optimization, byte caching and object caching can optimize key enterprise applications, including software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and SSL-encrypted content. 1 < >

3 The complexity of today s Web-based, enterprise applications Successful WAN optimization and application acceleration first requires an understanding of the complex application performance challenges many businesses face. For instance, the trend toward file and data consolidation has increased the need to reduce bandwidth and accelerate user performance. But IT also needs to focus on the critical applications the enterprise uses every day to generate revenue and meet business goals, such as Web-based ERP and CRM applications. In addition, more businesses are turning to outsourced enterprise applications such as Salesforce.com, WebEx, SAP, Oracle and Sharepoint, as well as online human resources, health insurance and payroll services. Accelerating these transactions requires deep knowledge of SSL encryption and specialized acceleration techniques. Moreover, as applications increasingly rely on Internet delivery, security and malware protection, you need solutions that drive both performance and security. How can you do it all without increasing IT costs? You first have to understand these application types and their performance requirements: Remote applications and branch offices Today s distributed enterprises are driven by a diverse set of applications, from files and to ERP and rich media, voice and video conferencing. Ubiquitous connectivity and seamless access to information, coupled with an increasingly distributed workforce and partner network, creates complex application delivery and security challenges for any business. Here s an example of the application mix in a typical enterprise: 2 < >

4 To successfully manage this diverse application set, you need effective intelligence to identify applications, distinguish between business-critical and harmful traffic, prevent data breaches and ensure compliance. Just as important, you need to develop a clear strategy for managing the increased network performance requirements stemming from Web 2.0 applications, video sites and mash-ups without blocking these applications entirely. Unfortunately, most existing acceleration tools lack the required application intelligence to distinguish between essential business activities and recreational or unauthorized use. So these tools often just accelerate all application traffic, across the network. But accelerating business transactions while preventing threats from crossing the Web gateway requires a granular level of network visibility that many IT organizations cannot access today. Delivering mobile applications to any user, on any computer, across any network requires comprehensive solutions with the visibility, acceleration and security to optimize hundreds of applications and billions of critical transactions every day. External applications: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), recreation and malware Intensifying competitive and economic pressures are forcing companies of all sizes to restructure their business operations. Managing a mobile workforce requires business applications and corporate databases that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time. To lower support costs, companies are increasingly turning to flexible software licensing that permits them to acquire the applications they need on a pay-as-you-go basis. As a result, more companies are adopting SaaS applications to keep pace with their rapidly changing business requirements. However, without an optimized WAN infrastructure, these applications often fail to deliver the performance and experience that users expect. To address these performance issues, some companies use a direct to the net approach in which Internet traffic goes straight to the Internet without a backhaul through corporate servers. While this approach can offset the backhaul-induced sluggishness associated with SaaS applications, it also creates the need for a Secure Web Gateway at each branch office. In addition, many companies lack a consistent policy that differentiates business-critical from harmful or non-essential network traffic. Since many 3 < >

5 businesses rely on popular Web sites such as YouTube, which can be used for both business and recreational purposes, wholesale Web site blocking is not an effective way to reduce bandwidth consumption. Enterprises must be able to apply both broad and granular user-based policy controls to ensure appropriate Web and application use to help protect against malware and other harmful content that can compromise application performance and security. Web and SSL applications Most enterprise applications, from front-end applications to emerging Web 2.0 services, now leverage Web delivery technologies such as HTTP and SSL. SSL provides essential security for Internet transactions. It can also create additional management headaches for IT organizations because SSL encryption thwarts normal acceleration and bandwidth management technologies. And, because SSL traffic is often exempt from oversight and interference, it is especially attractive as a host for malware and other harmful content. By creating a large and rapidly expanding pool of invisible and unmanaged WAN traffic, SSL is creating greater security concerns for IT administrators. To regain control over SSL-encrypted applications, you need solutions that can intercept, understand and accelerate encrypted content without violating privacy and security. Many organizations use an SSL proxy to inspect encrypted traffic, but this method can undermine the intent of SSL protection, which is to ensure privacy. To protect the confidentiality of certain transactions, IT can create policies that accelerate trusted SSL transactions without inspection. For example, employees can connect to secure Web brokerages to manage their corporate compensation plans, or to health insurance sites to schedule confidential doctor visits. The key is to deploy a solution that offers detailed network visibility and control, so you can ensure the right balance of application performance, security and privacy. Techniques for accelerating enterprise applications Most corporate environments today have hundreds of applications running on the network at any given time. All of these applications have different management issues, depending on the application type, and there is no onesize-fits-all technique to optimize performance across the board. You first need to understand the applications in your infrastructure and the acceleration technologies available. Then you can determine which technologies will deliver the best application performance across your distributed enterprise. 4 < >

6 Enterprise application types Rich media Enterprises like yours are frequently turning to new applications to streamline training and communications. Multimedia files that include voice, sound, graphics, animation and recordings can greatly simplify employee training or provide advertising content. But these powerful applications can also have a huge impact on the network. Files such as 100MB multimedia presentations streamed to users at branch offices can completely saturate WAN links. Therefore, live communications from the CEO or leadership teams are extremely difficult to deliver over today s distributed WAN. But by using a combination of media caching, split-streaming and CDN technologies, you can multiply bandwidth by dozens or thousands of times without increasing your network costs. Real-time applications Voice and unified communications, video conferencing, telepresence, thin client and virtual desktop technologies are being consolidated on enterprise WANs everywhere. While these technologies compete with other applications, they do not maintain large data sets or have protocol constraints, as many large files do. Instead, they are extremely sensitive to loss and delay, and require instantaneous movement across the WAN to achieve high performance quality. The biggest danger to real-time applications is other network traffic that pushes them out of the way, resulting in poor call quality, jerky video conferences and unresponsive thin clients. The value of intelligence You can t manage what you can t see. And with hundreds of applications, millions of Web sites and very powerful acceleration tools traversing your network every day, lack of visibility can lead to catastrophic consequences. Blind acceleration can drive recreational traffic that overpowers missioncritical applications and foster infections of Web-borne malware. To effectively manage today s IT environments, you need a solid foundation to differentiate applications and consistently apply corporate security policies to protect your business. 5 < >

7 Bandwidth management and traffic shaping Quality-of-service (QoS) techniques can contain disruptive applications by assigning a priority to a particular application s (or user s) network usage. The traffic is then sent in order of priority and afforded an appropriate amount of bandwidth. While this technique doesn t accelerate all traffic on the network, it does ensure high-priority traffic takes precedence. But to effectively leverage QoS capabilities, you need to understand the traffic at the application level. Protocol optimization Protocol optimization helps certain protocols, such as CIFS, MAPI, HTTP, TCP and HTTPS run more efficiently over the WAN. These optimization techniques do not reduce the amount of bandwidth an application consumes, but they can significantly accelerate applications, especially over satellite links. But without the right level of application knowledge, protocol acceleration can actually increase the bandwidth consumed by recreational downloads such as itunes, YouTube or other disruptive traffic. It can actually interfere with your most important applications if not properly applied and controlled. Byte caching and dictionary compression Byte caching is a low-level cache of small pieces of information. Byte caching and dictionary compression is typically not application-specific, and instead reduces bandwidth for all TCP traffic. It is a powerful tool to send incremental updates and reduce bandwidth for files, and many other applications. However, unlike object caching, it is not a powerful bandwidth reduction tool. Object caching Unlike byte caching, object caching is protocol- and application-specific. Object caching greatly reduces latency and bandwidth consumption to almost zero. If the cache does not contain the object (or contains an outdated version of the object), then for that particular transaction, object caching does nothing. These specialized technologies help maintain an up-to-date cache and accelerate content delivery: Adaptive Refresh -> Keeps dynamic content fresh -> Enables instant user delivery, asynchronous update (decouple object update from user request) -> Creates model of site changes and use to assure high-velocity content is pre-populated to object cache 6 < >

8 Web Pipelining -> Increases performance 50-90% -> Understands complex HTTP and HTTPS pages -> Processes connection and objects requests in parallel (rather than serial) Compression Compression uses a common algorithm to remove extraneous or predictable information from the traffic before it is transmitted. The data is then reconstituted at the destination based on that same algorithm. This technique reduces the data transmitted over the WAN link, but has limitations on how much it can reduce bandwidth and latency. Content delivery networking (CDN) -> Controls movement of data with policy and throttling to protect the performance of other applications Live stream-splitting -> Single media server connection, split at branch -> Pre-configured or dynamic stream-splitting -> 51 users, 50x bandwidth gain (only costs one stream on WAN) Media caching -> Cache once, serve infinitely -> Dynamic (on the fly) or prepositioned (CDN) content caching -> 100x bandwidth savings for 101 users deliver huge quality improvement The Application Delivery Network: Secure and optimize the flow of information across your distributed enterprise A comprehensive approach to application delivery can help you determine how to best apply these acceleration approaches and techniques. The ADN provides a critical layer that helps you go beyond just keeping applications up and running. It helps you stop malicious activities and deliver applications precisely when and where they re needed most. Most importantly, the ADN helps your business achieve greater application mobility and security in a changing global business environment. Avoiding performance pitfalls In many cases, a consolidated application translates to a poorly performing application. Long distances between users and applications, skinny or latencyprone network pipes, and applications and protocols stretched beyond their 7 < >

9 design limits often results in poor application performance at remote sites. These issues are exacerbated by the introduction of additional bandwidthhungry, latency-sensitive applications such as VoIP and video. IT normally responds to slow performance by adding more bandwidth, which is expensive and doesn t address the problem. This approach may also accelerate undesirable traffic, creating security vulnerabilities and further impeding business applications. An ADN infrastructure can help you avoid these pitfalls with the intelligence you need to accelerate business-critical applications while sidelining or blocking recreational or malicious traffic. ADN WAN Optimization capabilities include: -> Object and byte caching -> Compression and basic quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities -> External Web/SSL acceleration -> Protocol acceleration for TCP, CIFS/NFS, MAPI, HTTP and more -> Advanced Web policy and bandwidth management -> Advanced application ID technology -> Adaptive refresh and Web pipelining -> Content delivery networking, live stream-splitting and media caching Prevent unintended consequences of acceleration All acceleration technologies offer significant benefits, but for a given application, some might improve performance more then others. More importantly, you could actually slow the target application down by applying the wrong technique. Or worse, the technique may have no effect on the target application but may negatively impact other applications. For instance, when using byte caching to send large applications or application patches, the data cannot be compressed, and may actually force valuable information from other applications out of the cache. With an ADN approach, you can identify the application and apply the appropriate techniques without disrupting the byte cache within it. 8 < >

10 The Blue Coat Application Delivery Network: Accelerating applications from data center to device To help ensure consistent performance across all your business applications, Blue Coat ADN solutions deliver the intelligent control you need to secure and accelerate critical business applications. With Blue Coat, you can optimize application and network performance for any user, anywhere across a distributed enterprise. To help you identify and resolve performance delays, Blue Coat delivers unique insight into application performance and helps you apply the appropriate acceleration techniques when and where they re needed. You can quickly analyze and act on information about bandwidth utilization response times, network efficiency, SLA compliance, hosts and applications. You can also accelerate the performance of all your client/server applications and enable transparent access among VPN users who occasionally work in the office. With the ability to scale as your needs grow and change, the ADN gives you the flexibility to design a solution uniquely tailored for your infrastructure. You control costs by purchasing only the products and solutions you need, when you need them. As a result, you can deliver the application performance your users demand with confidence, consistency and cost-effectiveness across your distributed network. Learn how implementing an Application Delivery Network can help your organization prepare for the next wave of converging IT and business challenges. Find out more at 9 < >

11 Blue Coat Systems, Inc BCOAT Direct Fax Copyright 2009 Blue Coat Systems, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced by any means nor translated to any electronic medium without the written consent of Blue Coat Systems, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. Information contained in this document is believed to be accurate and reliable, however, Blue Coat Systems, Inc. assumes no responsibility for its use, Blue Coat is a registered trademark of Blue Coat Systems, Inc. in the U.S. and worldwide. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.