When choosing a WAN Optimization vendor, what are the features you are looking for?

At Replify we often get asked ‘can you improve application response times?’ or ‘can you reduce the amount of data sent across the network?’ and the answer is yes to both of these questions.

How do we do this?

We use four main techniques: compression, caching, application protocol optimization and TCP optimization.

By applying these four techniques (or a subset of them) we can help customers with a range of issues such as high latency, restricted bandwidth or congested links, poor application performance, and high bandwidth costs.

Caching

Our Intelligent Caching Engine (ICE) can provide significant bandwidth savings by eliminating duplicate requests across the WAN.

ICE inspects traffic traversing the network and adds it to a cache. If this content is encountered again, an instruction can be sent to retrieve it from the remote cache. As this instruction is much smaller (around 25 bytes) than the original data, much less traffic is transmitted.

This can generate huge savings in scenarios where there is traffic duplication. For example, if all users in the same office are working from the same SharePoint Online site, the site contents will only need to be transferred across the WAN once.

In scenarios like this where the data is suitable for caching, bandwidth savings of over 90% can be achieved.

Compression

Replify Accelerator will compress any traffic going across the network. We use a cutting edge compression algorithm that allows us to achieve similar levels of compression as the standard Zlib algorithm, while being able to maintain higher levels of throughput.

Additionally, we can configure our compression algorithm to compress at a much higher level than normal for scenarios where throughput isn’t high and bandwidth is at a premium.  For example, on connections using satellite links.

Layer 7 Protocol Optimization

Replify Accelerator can perform caching and compression for all TCP traffic. However, we also provide some extra optimizations for some of the more commonly used protocols such as SMB and HTTP.

Our layer 7 protocol optimization can also allow us to manipulate the protocol so that it works more effectively with our compression and caching algorithms. For example we can manipulate SSL traffic in order to apply our compression and caching algorithms to the underlying encrypted traffic.

TCP Optimization

The TCP protocol has been around for several decades and works well, however it can perform sub optimally on networks with high latency or levels of packet loss.  Replify Accelerator implements several techniques to mitigate this which can provide significant improvement on these types of links even if the data isn’t suited for compression or caching.

Overall effect

The first three techniques above reduce the amount of data going across your WAN. The last technique makes the transfer of data more efficient. These combine resulting in an improved user experience, reduced bandwidth usage and a less congested WAN.

Why not contact Replify to see how we can use these technique to help your customers?