WAN optimization

The need for a dedicated physical appliance to handle WAN optimization tasks, in many cases, is a thing of the past, according to experts who participated in a panel discussion Tuesday at Interop in Las Vegas.

After watching customers continually download and install one of the vendor's free, limited products from the company website, Silver Peak CEO Rick Tinsley was interested to see how they would respond to the same access to its more advanced products.

The application layer of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) stack has long been regarded as a focal point for wide area network (WAN) optimization. Efforts to optimize application delivery were centered here because the pain was rooted in optimizing only a handful of specific applications at branch or remote offices.

Silver Peak's upgraded WAN optimization software includes a high-speed virtual appliance for data centers and enables a dramatic reduction in the amount of traffic crossing WAN links.

Start-up Aryaka offers an optimized WAN service designed as an alternative to hardware and software optimization gear sold by Blue Coat, Cisco and Riverbed.

Riverbed has products on tap that will enable WAN optimization as a cloud service, speed up the boot time for remote virtual desktops and, perhaps in a year or two, a software client that will speed up the performance of handhelds and smartphones.

F5 is announcing at Interop an enterprise cloud architecture that incorporates its existing load load balancing, WAN optimization and security products with new ones to address the requirements of virtualized environments.