Making WAN Optimization More Accessible

In the last few months, we’ve seen the rise of virtual appliances that allow IT organizations to eliminate the need for many physical appliances. Most notably, companies such Riverbed Technology have been inviting companies to deploy their offerings as virtual appliances that can run on top of a physical Riverbed appliance.

But the folks at Certeon are arguing that the concept of a dedicated appliance for wide area network (WAN) optimization is itself obsolete given that this function can now be performed on the latest generation of multicore standard servers using a software-only approach.

Certeon CTO Donato Bucella argues that IT organizations need the flexibility of a software-only approach that can easily be deployed on any VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen or Red Hat KVM virtual machine software.

This approach not only makes WAN optimization more affordable, he said, it should also expand the reach of WAN optimization software. There are more latency-sensitive applications than ever on the Web. But most IT organizations have not been able to address the requirements of many of these applications because of the costs associated with acquiring and managing WAN optimization appliances.

As cloud computing evolves, Bucella also notes that an appliance model isn’t going to scale to meet the performance requirements of these types of applications. So when all is said and done, Bucella says that the days of WAN optimization appliances in the enterprise are already numbered.