Customer Challenges

Networks must be able to deliver optimal performance to support the business. Business suffers when application performance is diminished, or when networks do not deliver optimal application performance. As the workforce becomes more mobile, information technology (IT) organizations face new challenges to provide LAN-like response time over the WAN.

The issue is significantly worse in dynamically changing IT environments. New users and applications are constantly added and the network infrastructure continually changes. Do you know what applications are running on your network? Do you have the right tools to discover changes and have end-to-end visibility to be able to function in these dynamically changing environments? The Cisco WAN and application optimization solution can help you solve these common challenges. The solution is designed to improve application performance and delivery to meet dynamically changing and expanding business needs on an ongoing basis.

Why choose Cisco?

Cisco empowers network managers to deploy critical business applications on integrated networks to increase productivity and gain competitive advantages.

Cisco delivers advanced, integrated WAN and application optimization solutions to support a broad set of applications with different requirements, from IP communications to transaction-oriented applications. Cisco continues to add optimization techniques, and delivers the "network as the platform" vision. This means that the network is becoming intrinsic to the performance of applications.

Security directly affects network and application performance. A complete, holistic solution delivers more than just comprehensive WAN and application optimization capabilities, it also involves cooperation with security components to protect your business against disruption. Cisco offers a network-based systems approach.

A strategic systems approach uses the network to:

• Identify applications running in your network
• Gain end-to-end visibility
• Optimize your network and applications
• Control and protect business critical traffic

Solution Overview

WAN and Application Optimization Essentials:

Cisco WAN and application optimization is an architectural solution consisting of a set of tools and techniques working together to improve the reliability, performance and delivery of applications securely across your network. The solution consists of five key architectural components for effective application delivery.

Monitoring

Successful application delivery requires IT organizations to continuously identify the applications running on the network and ensure the acceptable performance of the applications that are relevant to the business, while controlling or eliminating irrelevant applications.

Classification

An intelligent network must evolve to become an active participant in application delivery. The network must be application-aware in order to assess and control application performance, and be able to automatically discover applications running on your network. Techniques must go beyond simple IP address or TCP port recognition; they must support dynamic and migrating port assignments using deep packet inspection technologies.

Optimization

A variety of techniques and tools are applied to network traffic to dramatically improve application performance and availability:

• Internet route control
• TCP flow optimization
• Data redundancy elimination
• Compression
• Caching
• Content delivery network
• Wide area file services
• Application specific acceleration
• DNS optimization
• Server caching
• Connection management

Control

Quality of Service (QoS) techniques ensure that business-critical traffic is not negatively impacted by less important traffic, and control is applied to conform to established business policies and priorities.

Network Management

Management tools are used to gather application and network performance information from the network, integrate the information into a series of comprehensive reports to provide visibility into the network and applications. Configuration management tools are also used to centrally define policies and perform system-based change and configuration management.