Special Delivery: Fast WANs and App Acceleration

Technology executives are centralizing data while their employees are dispersing far and wide. They’re all waiting anxiously for the WAN to deliver hot applications—fast—to mobile workers hankering for performance.

Technology managers and vendors are racing to oblige. This perfect storm of needs—including more mobile workers, the Webification of software, speedier networks and office consolidation—is driving the rapid growth of application acceleration technologies to the point where they are becoming enterprise mainstays just as switches and routers are today.

As those technologies, delivered today mostly as network appliances, become strategic for enterprises, Juniper Networks is one vendor capitalizing on the trend. On Oct. 16, Juniper will introduce a new high-end appliance and operating system update aimed at enterprises looking to increase their deployments from a dozen to hundreds of locations while ensuring high availability of the devices.

Juniper’s launch of the new WXC590, which can support 140 locations over a single 45M bps DS-3 line or 420 locations over a 155M bps OC-3 connection when three are stacked together, coincides with the launch of another new high-end appliance from upstart rival Silver Peak Systems.

Silver Peak will introduce its NX8500 appliance, capable of supporting up to 500M-bps data rates for replicating data between data centers in business continuity applications (see related story, Page 24).

Technology executives and analysts say what’s driving the rapid acceptance of these technologies—which are divided between ADCs (application delivery controllers) that sit in front of Web servers and WOCs (WAN optimization controllers) that work in pairs between a central site and each remote branch office—can be attributed to many factors, but one sticks out: Information workers typically operate away from the corporate LAN.

Read the full story on eWeek: Special Delivery: Fast WANs and App Acceleration