WAN acceleration gear grows up

摘要

Businesses should expect to face ia wide and confusing array of choices when seeking the right WAN-acceleration gear to make transaction times tolerable as they shift from branch office servers to centralized server farms. Centralization reduces the number of servers and so saves capital and maintenance costs, and improves security. But it also means more end users access data via the WAN — users who will scream if performance degrades as a result. Availl, Cisco and Brocade offer products tuned to speed up specific types of WAN traffic — wide-area file services or WAFS — which represent a large chunk of the new WAN traffic that results when servers are centralized. But a throng of other vendors says its more broadly focused gear is better suited to real customer needs. All WAN traffic can benefit from acceleration, they say, and not all WAN traffic is WAFS.