Remote connectivity issues and how Wide Area File Services help overcome them

Over time, what started as only Wide Area File Services has evolved into today’s WAN Optimization market with a combination of different Wide Area File Services features like data reduction and application acceleration proxies as well as other technologies such as QoS, traffic shaping, application-level visibility. The term is now used to refer to products that actually perform multiple functions rather than just file related actions.

With increased usage of applications and files over WAN networks, remote connectivity plays an increasingly important role for global communication for different enterprises. However, with increased distances comes the cost due to high latency and bandwidth issues due to the inherent nature of Wide Area Networks or WANs. Performing simple operations on a file remotely can take agonizing minutes while you watch the system slow down and try to save the file at some remote server. Slow or congested/dropped connections may even result in a failure to save the file and result in work either being lost or the user having to make the same changes once again. For each interaction made by a user, there are usually multiple to and fro requests being made over the network. While not a problem over short distances and over LANs, the story changes when operating over a WAN. The long WAN latency involved causes each request to take a longer time and hence each operation turns into an agonizing exercise. Most file transfer protocols like CIFS, FTP etc have similar behaviour since they were initially designed keeping LANs in mind and not WANs.

To resolve any bandwidth issues, specific data reduction and compression techniques are used to reduce the actual amount of data being transferred over the WAN. In order to accelerate the actual file transfer, specific application acceleration proxies are available for each protocol which understand and manage the requests sent over the WAN to avoid having to wait for an acknowledgement after sending each chunk of data as these protocols and applications are designed to do.

To reduce the effects of WAN latency and resolve similar issues, WAN Optimization or Wide Area File Services (WAFS) are increasingly being deployed by businesses. Wide Area File Services technology helps access remote locations over a WAN with LAN-like speeds. Some of the key advantages of Wide Area File Services are:

1. Server Consolidation: The fact that users can access remote files over the WAN at LAN-like speeds means that enterprises can now move servers out of the branch office and place them in centrally located datacenters. This results in significant savings in terms of infrastructure, IT manpower, storage requirements etc

2. Increased Performance: Protocols like CIFS used by Microsoft file-sharing can be accelerated for improved performance using application acceleration proxies. Other file sharing protocols like FTP can also be accelerated with specific proxies. This results in better performance for all file related operations.

For more information visit:

1. http://www.aryaka.com

2. http://www.tekbar.net/technology-innovation/wafs-centralized-remote-data-storage.html

3. http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/node33.html