Carrier-provided WAN optimization goes virtual

WAN optimization is becoming increasingly popular as a managed service, as enterprises that have embraced it for years outsource it to carriers as a way of saving money in a harsh economy. But as carriers continue to pursue this opportunity, some key trends are changing the way WAN optimization is delivered and used.

Especially favored by multinational enterprises that routinely communicate (internally or externally) across continents and oceans, WAN optimization reduces bandwidth waste in a number of ways. When video is transported across the network, deep-packet inspection can be used to scan the traffic for recurring patterns, avoiding the needless repetition of duplicate information. In a video speech, for example, WAN optimization gear can transmit the changing elements – like the person talking – while taking out the unchanging background, substituting it with a short code that signals the command to simply leave the background as is. These sorts of waste-trimming actions can not only save bandwidth but improve the performance of applications by reducing latency.

WAN optimization providers are already seeing heightened demand as a result of the increasing use of video for corporate communications – whether it's on-demand training videos or live messages from the CEO. WAN optimization gear can cache the training videos locally so they're only delivered over the WAN once. And it can split live video at the receiving end, so multiple employees can watch a single video stream transported across the network.

"The barriers to creating that kind of content have fallen away completely," said Mark Urban, head of product marketing for BlueCoat Systems, a vendor of WAN optimization gear. "Now a dumb monkey like me can shoot a video of one of our tech guys doing a demo and post it to the web. The production requirements have dropped to almost zero. But that's a 50-, 100-, sometimes 300-meg[abyte] file. The bandwidth hasn't kept up."

One of the key trends impacting WAN optimization is the increasing use of web browsers as the user interface of choice for a variety of applications that once ran on their own platforms. This is partly driven by the demand for applications to be based in the network as opposed to the user device, which allows those user devices to be simpler and less expensive.

"There's continued consolidation around the web browser as the default user interface," said Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner. "As a result, we'll see a number of solutions that just focus on delivering browser-based traffic -- not remote file or remote mail access; it's all browsing. It will be focused on software as a service and cloud computing. In some ways it lowers the barrier to entry and changes technologically how you accomplish [WAN optimization]."

Convergence toward a browser interface doesn't mean all office work is homogenizing as web browsing, of course. Companies still need to make decisions about how to prioritize a variety of different web-based applications in terms of the network resources they consume: While some employees are collaborating remotely in real time on hosted cloud-based documents, others are watching videos of their friends' skateboarding stunts in Facebook. WAN optimization can make sure the latter doesn't interfere with the former.

This browserization – along with the eventual rise of virtual hosted desktops -- could commoditize some aspects of WAN optimization technology, since different vendors have optimized around different protocols, many of which will fall out of use in favor of browsers.

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