Optimizing WAN Optimization

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1 Optimizing WAN Optimization New WAN, New Enterprise, New Needs By John E. Burke Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research Executive Summary New applications and an evolving organizational environment drive bandwidth growth and a need for predictable, stable, real-time performance. Voice Over IP (VoIP), voice and video conferencing, and collaboration tools are sweeping through organizations, while Software as a Service (SaaS) is shifting the place where optimization (and security) must happen. Desktop virtualization adds desktop-like to LAN-like as a user-performance expectation. As a result, network traffic must be conditioned to the new applications and controlled according to organizational policies and priorities. As IT shifts to charging business lines back for bandwidth, it will need the visibility and control to meet user expectations and business line SLAs. Now is the time for IT to re-evaluate its WAN optimization requirements and plans. The Issue Engineering networks for application delivery is challenging because the target moves continually. Where a few years ago primary focus might have been on moving files around, or optimizing delivery of Outlook/Exchange traffic, today s enterprise is moving rapidly into newer and less well-understood waters. New applications are coming on quickly, many needing lots of bandwidth and real-time performance. They are highly visible to users (there s nothing more visible than the quality of rolling video, for example) and because the apps are critical to new modes of collaboration and customer service, they are not optional. New architectures and applications that dramatically change performance requirements include Voice Over IP (VoIP), voice and video conferencing, and other collaboration tools; data-center consolidation; Software as a Service; and desktop virtualization. We are adding video, says an IT director at a state technology agency. So we will need to do something. Even evolution of Web interfaces to Web 2.0 technologies undercuts the effectiveness of old Web optimizations. 1

2 In situations where enough bandwidth is available, lack of conditioning of the bandwidth can be crippling, especially to applications such as desktop video conferencing that need a well-behaved link for acceptable performance. IT must somehow mitigate the effects of latency (the bane of voice and video communications) and packet loss, and thereby to improve the performance and response time of such applications delivered over the WAN. Application response time is the key! says the senior architect at a large energy company. Moreover, organizations need not just capacity and conditioning but control: the ability to ensure capacity is going to applications according to their priority. They must prioritize traffic in fairly granular ways, especially with media sharing a continuing concern and recreational use of bandwidth-intensive social media and other sites still on the rise. Video conferences should not suffer because there is a new LoLcats video on YouTube. Access to critical SaaS applications must take priority over basic Web browsing or even over other, less-critical SaaS services. When IT charges back for WAN utilization about 21% of organizations do, an average of $60/Kbps the business lines have a strong incentive to demand the best performance for their money. They will press for meaningful performance guarantees in their SLAs, and so IT staffs will have ever-stronger incentive not only to deliver the performance but to be able to verify they are doing so for any and all applications (i.e. that the network is not the problem, if there is one). Where IT does not yet chargeback for WAN bandwidth, the spread of IT service management philosophy and techniques suggests that it will be soon. The State of WAN Optimization Deployment WAN optimization is present now in nearly three-quarters of the organizations participating in Nemertes Spring 2009 research. (Please see Figure 1: State of WAN Optimization, Page 3.) About half of them consider their deployments complete, that is, they have gone as far with it as they intended to when they started. Overwhelmingly (more than 90%), organizations say deploying WAN optimization fixed the problems they were trying to resolve. However, satisfaction with deployments tends to drop over time. Organizations rate their efforts extremely successful (5 out 5) in the evaluation and pilot phases of their deployments, but just successful (3 out of 5) by the time they move to full deployment. Part of the decline is the inevitable increased complexity of managing a full production deployment rather than a pilot. Another part is dissatisfaction with the cost of rolling out the full solution. More significant, and growing in importance, is that moving-target problem. The organization s chosen solution might fully solve the problems it was brought in to solve, but not do as well with problems arising out of new application deployments or other infrastructure changes. Video and voice top the list of applications the incumbent deployment is not addressing well. 2

3 Figure 1: State of WAN Optimization Data center consolidation is also an issue. Servers moved from APAC to California, says one network engineer at a large international equipment manufacturer. Consequently, users in APAC branches saw the problem in WAN performance shift from capacity on low-bandwidth links to delay over low-speed links and support for application consolidation. In industries that were earlyadopters of WAN optimization, the ongoing success of the deployed solution often drops; financial-services organizations, for example, rate their solutions only partially successful (2 out of 5) now, as a result of changes in application sets and in overall IT architecture. What Next for WAN Optimization The generational dissatisfaction with older WAN optimization solutions in the face of new challenges is leading to contemplation of new vendors, technologies, and options for deployment. Likewise, deployment of performancesensitive applications is driving new adoptions: We re looking at optimization now, especially for VOIP, says the manager of telecommunications at a large, multi-campus university not currently using WAN optimization. In addition to reviewing options with current vendors and their competitors in in-house, appliance-based optimization, organizations are contemplating new 3

4 deployment architectures. Primarily, they re looking at integrating optimization with other IT or network functions; and at using a managed optimization solution. Nemertes finds a solid majority (67%) of organizations prefer (assuming cost and performance equivalence) a solution that integrates optimization into other network gear, such as routers or security appliances, or onto branch-office servers. We would love to have fewer devices, fewer vendors, says the network architect at a large defense contractor. Others, seeing narrow and specialized needs for optimization of specific applications traffic, are considering software-based optimization located among the servers generating the traffic. Either way, whether by collapsing the network equipment stack or by moving optimization into the data-center server plant, IT hopes to reduce the cost and complexity of deployment. Still, about 17% of organizations say they ll stick with a separate optimization layer, mainly to compartmentalize operational risk, and the remainder has no preference regarding integration or separation. I don't know that I care, says the CIO at an agricultural products company. What I do care about is, can I standardize it, and what's the ease of maintaining it. Nemertes finds about 43% of organizations prefer (presuming equal or lower costs and equivalent performance) a carrier-based managed optimization solution. This is notable, given such options barely existed 18 months ago. Fewer than 5% of organizations use such solutions. Carrier-based solutions cover both managed customer-premise equipment (CPE) deployments the carrier putting optimization appliances on the customer side of WAN connections, a necessity if bandwidth-reduction is a goal and fully cloud-based solutions, an option when traffic shaping and protocol acceleration are the key requirements. We don t need this much now, not much inter-site traffic, says one state university CIO. But when we deploy more voice and video among sites, we might. Optimization for the Next Enterprise WAN As IT teams contemplate the new WAN they re creating in response to the changing needs of their organizations, they also are defining what they most need from the next generation of WAN optimization. The biggest changes include the continuing consolidation of IT into fewer locations; the rise of unified communications and UC-enabled collaboration; the increase in SaaS and the decline of branch Internet backhaul; and rising interest in virtual desktops and support for telework. No matter the technologies or work patterns supported, optimization products must continue to provide a window on WAN and Internet operations, with visibility into everything crossing connections and how resource consumption lines up with organizational needs and priorities. Ideally, deep understanding of application traffic combined with granular control enables IT to set, monitor, and enforce SLAs and other policies regarding use of network resources. 4

5 Consolidation and Virtualization Organizations of all sizes continue to centralize their IT services out of branches and into data centers. Many also work now to consolidate into fewer data centers. More than half (57%) of organizations are committed to a fully centralized delivery model, and another 32% deliver most applications centrally but retain some distributed server plant. The percentage of workers gaining access to critical IT services over the WAN continues to grow. Therefore, the need for optimization to guarantee application performance across those connections also continues to grow. Options exist now, too, to use virtualization and embedded processing to consolidate what few servers will remain in a branch onto WAN optimization appliances. However, 53% of organizations would rather keep running servers on their preferred server platform rather than use an appliance-based solution. Keeping physical servers in the branch can create need for optimization, for file-system synchronization, for example, or application executable caching. The fact that servers remain in the branch also creates a new option for infrastructure consolidation within the branch: virtualized optimization appliances running on branch server plant. Half (50%) of organizations would like the chance to run branch-office optimization as a virtual appliance on a standard server, rather than as a standalone device. Voice, Video and Collaboration Some of the most exciting and potentially transformative applications spreading through organizations now center on real-time, presence-enabled communications, and collaboration tools built on them. With 59.6% of organizations deploying some form of UC, and another 17% in the planning and piloting phases, optimization that is sensitive to the particulars of real-time voice and video traffic will become crucial. VoIP was the earliest such application, with 84.9% of organizations in some phase of VoIP deployment. As deployments proceed most touch fewer than 50% of employees, currently organizational WAN optimization will have to become every more capable of juggling the performance needs of many simultaneous realtime streams moving across a complete mesh of branches. Videoconferencing and high-resolution telepresence are following VoIP. Already 77.6% of companies deploy room-to-room videoconferencing, but a growing number are adding desktop conferencing and telepresence systems. (Please see Figure 2: Video Conferencing Adoption, Page 6.) The economy and growing ecological awareness of organizations combine to reinforce the spread of videoconferencing as a cost-saving alternative to travel. In fact, 74% of those deploying videoconferencing can say with confidence that it is reducing their organizations travel time, and 47.8% have or are developing policies to promote videoconferencing to replace travel. Desktop conferencing, present in 52.8% of organizations, places more burden on optimizers as it increases the number of video streams to juggle and the number of endpoints involved in the conversations. Telepresence, the use of highdefinition and large-screen systems with matching furniture and directional 5

6 acoustics, in place in 27.8% of organizations, is also tougher than standard roombased conferencing since it requires more bandwidth and even better behavior with respect to packet loss and jitter. Complicating all of this is the need to optimize delivery to and from Internet sites such as GoToMeeting or WebEx, as well as internal sites. Increasing use of direct branch-to-internet connectivity 57% of organizations now have direct Internet access in at least some branches, as opposed to 28.6% that backhaul all Internet traffic to and from data centers will put the burden of optimization on the branch network and possibly the end-point device. Software as a Service The rise of SaaS continues, with 59.1% of organizations using SaaS now and another 9.1% evaluating solutions. Combine this continuing shift of enterprise application traffic from WAN to Internet with the rise of direct-to-branch Internet access, and the optimization needs of the enterprise move out to the branches in a new way. In addition to whatever WAN optimization may be required (caching, compression, etc), branches are coming to require their own Internet-focused optimization, centering on bandwidth guarantees and limits and on traffic shaping to get SaaS applications what they need. Teleworkers or micro-branch staff, lacking appliances, will need some softclient solution % Videoconferencing Adoption Using Evaluating Not Using 90.0% 15.8% 80.0% 70.0% 31.9% 6.6% 50.0% 60.0% 15.3% 50.0% 40.0% 77.6% 22.2% 30.0% 52.8% 20.0% 10.0% 27.8% 0.0% Desktop Room-based Telepresence Figure 2: Video Conferencing Adoption 6

7 Use of direct Internet access to critical applications (and ultimately the use of any cloud resources) puts an increased security burden on the branch network, requiring a solution that can meet organizational requirements for protection from malware, attacks, and data leakage, as well as for compliance auditing and reporting. Organizations can use multiple appliances or an integrated solution, as discussed previously, to meet these new security needs. Virtual Desktops With 22% of companies already deploying virtual desktops, and 50% or more expecting to by mid-2010, the readiness of enterprise WANs for remote desktop traffic is rapidly becoming an important consideration. Remote desktop protocols, although low in their bandwidth requirements, require some of the same things as real-time communications protocols: low packet loss and stability in delivery (low jitter). Optimization is often necessary to turn a WAN into a virtual-desktop-ready delivery engine. This goes doubly for connections over the Internet, such as to a green lane telecommuter. Two-thirds of organizations now have a formal teleworking policy in place, compared to only 37% a year ago, representing a massive increase in the awareness of the financial and environmental benefits of supporting telework, as well as a significant increase in the profile of telework within organizations. Whether through an optimization soft-client or a small or virtual appliance, staff depending on Internet-delivered remote desktops for all-day access to enterprise applications often will require optimization to make the performance reliable. By compensating for the variability of Internet throughput, optimizers can significantly improve the users quality of experience. Conclusions and Recommendations VoIP and collaboration tools such as voice and video conferencing are sweeping through organizations, provisioned out of ever fewer data centers as IT centralization and consolidation proceed. Software as a Service is shifting the place where optimization, compliance audits, and security (both malware screening and data leak prevention) must happen. Desktop virtualization guarantees that users will expect desktop-like performance for remote desktop sessions, just as they expect LAN-like performance for network applications. These new applications and this evolving corporate environment are driving bandwidth growth and rising need for predictable, stable, real-time performance. To deliver new services to users in an evolving branch and telework environment, IT may need to compress traffic to conserve bandwidth, but must condition network traffic to guarantee acceptable performance. The organization must also control traffic to ensure capacity goes to applications according to their organizational priority, and not to recreational or social media sites. As business lines increasingly have to pay IT for their bandwidth, IT having visibility into traffic, control over it, and the ability to condition traffic will be essential not just to meeting user expectations but also business line SLAs. 7

8 Now is the time for organizations to take a close look at their WAN optimization systems and plans. They should: Evaluate new application requirements and performance to gauge the suitability of current WAN and optimization. Be prepared to upgrade, replace, or supplement current solutions for new use cases or traffic types. Expect an increase in real-time and fault-intolerant traffic, if not an increase in bandwidth. Optimize for the shift in traffic flows as a result of IT centralization and data center consolidation. Optimize for the shift of traffic associated with desktop virtualization. Control, monitor, secure, and optimize traffic with SaaS providers and other direct-to-internet branch traffic. Plan on providing optimization and security to progressively more numerous and smaller endpoints: big branches become mini branches become teleworkers. Cheap hardware or robust, affordable soft clients are key. About Nemertes Research: Nemertes Research is a research-advisory firm that specializes in analyzing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies. You can learn more about Nemertes Research at our Website, or contact us directly at research@nemertes.com. 8