The Common Strategies Used In WAN Optimization

In most corporate settings such as a school or a business, a wide area network is often necessary to keep the operations of the facility running. The fact that most processes are now done over the network in such settings means that the architecture of the wide area network has to be of high quality to ensure that service provision is not disrupted at any one time. There are a couple of things that can be done to facilitate this, the most important of which is WAN optimization. To take advantage of such a service, you will need to consult a company that provides IT support in Bay Area.

As the name seems to suggest, WAN optimization is simply a method of making sure that the wide area network works optimally. There are many things that can reduce the effectiveness of such a network, including the way in which the different clients use it. To overcome this, there has been a lot of research into the different ways in which such networks can be optimized. By making use of some of them, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on expanding your bandwidth in order to make the system run efficiently.

It is important to note that optimization of a WAN network is normally a technical process. You need to get it done by a professional if you are to realize the benefits that it’s supposed to yield. Some of the techniques that are normally used in the process include:

Deduplication

In any WAN network, there is the potential for data to be sent in a redundant manner. This means that it will end up using more bandwidth than usual, and this in turn means that the whole system will be slowed down as a result. If this is a major problem for your network, you could opt to get deduplicatoin done. This is a process whereby references to the data are sent across the network, rather than the data itself. As a result, the load to the bandwidth will be reduced. The fact that this protocol is instituted at the byte level means that the changes can be seen across most protocols. For instance, if you use the network to send data in the form of media and documents, all of them will benefit from deduplication.

Compression

Compression is one of the oldest methods of optimizing any WAN network. As the name suggests, this is a way in which the data is transformed into a smaller size than usual, without losing the essence of the data. As a result, the entire system will be faster than usual. There are various protocols that are used to compress data including ZIP, RAR and ARJ. When doing WAN optimization, the system can be set up in such a manner that the data is converted into one of these compressed forms on the fly, so that clients don’t need to manually do it. This is normally achieved by placing the compression within the hardware that is used to accelerate the system.

Latency optimization

When optimizing any WAN system, latency is one of the important issues you need to address. In order to optimize the latency, there are a number of Transmission Control Protocols that might need to be refined. These include layer-3 congestion control algorithms, window size scaling, colocation strategies and selective acknowledgements. As you might imagine, all these are highly technical issues. This means that if you are interested in getting them done, you would be better off consulting a firm that has the skill needed for it.

Protocol spoofing

In any WAN environment, you will find that there are some applications that keep sending a lot of data on a regular basis. In such cases, the multiple requests can all be bundled together and then dealt with as one to avoid overloading the system. This strategy is known as protocol spoofing.

Traffic shaping

You might have a few applications that need access to large bandwidth, and others that don’t need that much data. In such cases, you can take advantage of traffic shaping to try and model the network to conform to such needs. In such cases, the system will provide high bandwidth to the applications or users who have been specified to need it more, and lower bandwidth to other applications.

Connection limits

If a major concern is to prevent denial of service due to numerous requests from one client who probably does not need that much access, you can limit the number of connections that can arise from that user. This is one of the most effective ways of limiting gridlock on the system.

These are just some of the technical things you can do to ensure that your WAN network works as expected. There are some that might be useful in some cases, and some that might not. To ensure that you spend money on changes that are worth it, always consult an IT support consultant first.