Cisco, Microsoft, Others Heat Up WAN Optimization Market

Experiences like this are why WAN optimization has bolted up the IT priority list, and why we're seeing a flurry of vendor activity. Weinberger's decision came down to buying more bandwidth or buying WAN optimization controllers, devices that typically sit at both ends of a WAN link and are designed to increase effective throughput and decrease network lag time. He bought 10 of Riverbed Technology's Steelhead optimization appliances and got latency back to where it had been.

Cisco Systems plans in the coming days to introduce a line of WAN optimization products that integrate with the rest of its networking offerings through its router and switch operating system. Cisco already has an application delivery controller device and a lower-functionality WAN controller, but the new line will make it more competitive with the likes of Riverbed and market leader Packeteer, Cisco VP George Kurian says. Cisco's expected to include most of the features found in market-leading boxes, such as compression, caching, and protocol optimization. The products will be integrated with Cisco's operating system to shorten integration time and leverage visibility into the network and will be part of a line that also includes Cisco's application delivery device and an older WAN optimization product. Juniper Networks, which acquired Redline and Peribit last year, also plans new WAN optimization products in the next few months with improved scalability, reporting, and visibility, and that work with more applications.

In the last two weeks, Riverbed and Blue Coat Systems released new software and appliances designed to make customer WANs even faster, and Citrix Systems and Microsoft announced they'll co-develop Citrix's WANScaler line, acquired earlier this month from Orbital Data, to run on Windows Server by the second half of next year.

The third generation of Riverbed's RiOS software adds the ability to speed up the type of client-server interactions commonly used in Unix systems and Novell networks; adds new techniques to speed up Windows file transfers and Microsoft Exchange traffic; lets users prioritize certain types of traffic; and improves management and monitoring. Riverbed also introduced three scalable devices aimed at large branch offices and data centers.

Blue Coat, in a more limited release, announced appliances the company says increase effective throughput two to three times its existing models because of faster processors and increased memory. The vendor also introduced an add-in card that accelerates Secure Sockets Layer processing and traffic.

Careers On The Line
Gartner predicts the WAN optimization market will explode in the next few years, from $475 million last year to $1.5 billion by 2008. WAN links are getting more crowded and less trustworthy for many reasons: data and server consolidation; rising remote backup demands; use of Web-based apps, VoIP, and videoconferencing; more employees working on the road and from home offices.

WAN optimization is one piece of what's broadly defined as the application acceleration market--software and devices that speed up the network so that companies don't have to buy more of what Packeteer CEO Dave Côté calls "brute-force bandwidth." Half of the market is application delivery, focused on techniques in the data center to move data faster and more efficiently and led by F5 Networks. The other half is WAN optimization, focusing on how that data's moving on the wide area network (see chart, above).

Rotten WAN performance can be a career-breaker for an IT manager, given how dependent most companies are on their networks. New England engineering company Wright-Pierce has grown from one office in 2000 to five today. The move from all LAN to lots of WAN traffic forced the company a few years ago to let employees download large CAD files only once a day and upload them again at the end of the day--intolerable at an engineering firm. "My name became mud as fast as you could spell it," IT manager Ray Sirois says. Sirois installed Riverbed appliances in 2003 as a beta customer of the vendor's first release. The caching mechanism decreased the amount of traffic over the WAN as much as 95% while letting engineers collaborate on CAD files as they had on the LAN.

The WAN optimization market started in the late 1990s with Packeteer's rate-shaping, a queuing scheme that let users allocate bandwidth by protocol or application. The new generation of appliances typically combines a series of features, including protocol optimization, data compression, disk-based file caching, and to a lesser degree load balancing, which is found in complementary application delivery controllers from F5 and in Citrix's NetScaler. Established vendors like Packeteer and Expand are working to add features as robust as those of newer entrants such as Riverbed and Juniper.

Protocol optimization looks to cut the number of round trips made in specific types of transmissions, like Windows file transfers that run on the CIFS protocol, E-mail on the MAPI protocol, Novell NetWare on the NSF protocol, and Web traffic on HTTP. Disk-based file caching operates on the premise that the best way to unclog the WAN is to send less data. Caching attempts to recognize recently sent data and not resend it--so at Wright-Pierce, when a recently downloaded CAD file that has been slightly tweaked is updated, the engineer sends only the updated piece of the larger file back to the file server, decreasing the amount of data on the link.

Much of Riverbed's success is thanks to its advanced protocol optimization and caching features, Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala says. Although it's had products for less than three years, Riverbed has partnerships with major integrators and storage companies, including Hewlett-Packard and McData. The private, venture-backed company says it doubled its customer base in the last year and grew 30% a quarter for two years.

The WAN optimization market has been in flux the last 18 months. Juniper Networks spent a combined $469 million to buy WAN optimization specialist Peri- bit and application delivery specialist Redline in April 2005. Subsequently, F5 acquired Swan Labs, Packeteer bought Tacit Networks, Expand Networks acquired DiskSites, and Cisco bought Actona and FineGround. Last month, Citrix Systems snapped up Orbital Data for $50 million, having acquired application delivery company NetScaler last year for $300 million.

Where The Technology's Weak
WAN optimization doesn't cure all. To get the results they want, businesses often must buy application delivery controllers, devices that sit in the data center and do load balancing and SSL acceleration, among other things, Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa says. Although some WAN optimization products provide limited visibility into the network--one of Packeteer's major selling points--most companies must buy network management and monitoring tools to find and fix bottlenecks.

Visibility tools are getting better. At aircraft equipment design company ElectroImpact, senior network engineer Jon Wilson can use any computer to log on and see what traffic is being accelerated and what traffic isn't on his new Riverbed boxes. Since two of ElectroImpact's offices are in England, this makes fixing problems much quicker when he gets a call at his Washington home in the middle of the night.

One glaring shortcoming is so-called transparency, how easy it is to install and integrate a box into the network. Vendors say their boxes can slot right in, but that's not true for most, Gartner's Skorupa says. WAN optimization controllers from Packeteer use tunneling techniques, similar to a VPN's, that require users to reconfigure firewalls, network services, and network monitoring and management software in order for those things not to break. Riverbed's boxes require administrators to open firewall ports and, until the most recent version, didn't preserve individual IP addresses, so management software would think all the traffic was coming from the Riverbed box itself--preventing managers from knowing which employee was gobbling bandwidth with downloads of X-Men 3 bootlegs. Transparency is one reason Citrix bought Orbital instead of one of its competitors, Citrix VP Wes Wasson says.

Another gaping shortcoming is that most WAN optimization products do little for the growing ranks of home and mobile workers. Help is on the way, as smaller vendors such as ICT Compress, Stampede Technologies, and Kontiki roll out WAN optimization controllers that sit on employees' computers. Other vendors will surely follow.

More improvements should come from an emerging technique that looks even deeper into traffic than the protocols, understanding specific applications and actions tied to them. In typical caching schemes, the software scans packets for streams of data it recognizes as recently downloaded. Certeon's Application Acceleration Blueprint software understands patterns of packets from specific applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint and Oracle's E-Business Suite, and does predic- tive analysis to more quickly sift through packets.

With Cisco and Microsoft taking a keen interest, the market could mature into a fight among Cisco, Citrix/Microsoft, and a few leading point vendors such as Packeteer, Juniper, and Riverbed, analysts say. When Citrix and Microsoft announced their partnership two weeks ago, Gartner analysts put out a report proclaiming the dawn of a heated Microsoft-Cisco rivalry.

Cisco has the advantage it brings to every service on a network--millions of installed routers and switches to which it can add WAN optimization as a feature. Microsoft, of course, can leverage its place on desktops and servers. The point-product vendors must stay ahead of the innovation and performance curve to fend them off.

With so much riding on WAN performance, IT managers appear ready to pay up for results. Automotive gas tank maker Inergy Automotive Systems did two rounds of server consolidation only to discover its critical ERP systems no longer performed well. Employees would click to enter orders and nothing would happen, leading to fees because an advance shipping notice didn't go through, says Arun DeSouza, manager of global service and chief information security officer. Inergy started buying more bandwidth every six to eight months to keep up. Since buying Packeteer's PacketShaper devices last year, ERP transactions always go through, and wait times have been cut in half. The company has had to make only one expensive bandwidth upgrade.

The WAN optimization market is built on this IT truth: No one notices when the network works, but just watch the phone light up when it doesn't. As long as vendors can keep that phone quiet, they're going to have buyers on the line.