WAN acceleration improves network application performance by speeding access to resources such as e-mail, CRM databases, and Web servers. WAN acceleration products addresses the common bandwidth, latency and loss issues that can hamper server centralization and data protection plans. WAN acceleration can be an essential tool for overcoming these challenges. WAN accelerators normally provide 10-100x reduction in wide area network utilization once they are deployed.

WAN acceleration technology typically can help majority of network applications, giving businesses maximum wide area network efficiency. WAN Acceleration provides immediate and unique benefits that span all aspects of business operations. WAN accelerators has become a key piece of the puzzle to solving the issues IT has faced for years.

By using WAN acceleration device, you can provide LAN-like access to data and applications anywhere throughout the enterprise network, allowing for real time collaboration for users in branch offices and mobile workers around the world. This has happened in large part as a result of new technology and the information explosion powered by access to the Internet. As interest and adoption of WAN acceleration technology grows, enterprises are demanding better scalability and modularity in these appliances. Partly as a result of this, and the relative newness of the technology, there is a lot of confusion and uncertainty by about some of the more common WAN acceleration technologies being employed today. Here is a short list of areas that WAN accelerators can help:

• Reduce WAN Bandwidth
• Server and Storage Consolidation
• Disaster Recovery

The news keeps getting better on WAN acceleration, with wider connections, better monitoring and management, and a commitment by leading vendors to incorporate the technology directly into future networking platforms. Using a variety of techniques WAN acceleration technology optimizes and speeds data movement over relatively slow links thus saving money on communications costs. To further enhance application delivery, many WAN acceleration solutions have QoS features to prioritize data across the wide area network. WAN acceleration appliances can also employ additional latency mitigation techniques, such as selective TCP acknowledgements and adjustable TCP window sizes, to further improve data transfer times across long WAN links.

Now that WAN acceleration has matured, it has become a critical part of every IT professionals strategy to improve application performance and disaster recovery plans. WAN accelerators can protect IT’s investments in critical applications by making sure end users get consistent application performance and that IT can deliver full proof disaster recovery and data replication for the network. As a result, WAN acceleration provides an extremely rapid return on investment, plus the intangible benefit of increased user productivity and unsurpassed IT satisfaction.