WAN Management/Optimisation

Wardie said:
Is there any software/hardware which would be more beneficial than an implementation of this?

http://www.packeteer.com/products/packetshaper/
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Thanks for the reply, what do you reckon about the last bit of my post that I quoted above?

From where i'm sitting a the moment, it seems like any changes regarding different hardware or technology for wan optimisation or acceleration aren't really going to offer much of a tangible benefit, and perhaps how these implementations have been configured should be reviewed.

Ultimately it might come down to having to upgrade the WAN link itself...

***Eeeeee you ninja edited***
 
Wardie said:
Thanks for the reply, what do you reckon about the last bit of my post that I quoted above?

From where i'm sitting a the moment, it seems like any changes regarding different hardware or technology for wan optimisation or acceleration aren't really going to offer much of a tangible benefit, and perhaps how these implementations have been configured should be reviewed.

Ultimately it might come down to having to upgrade the WAN link itself...

***Eeeeee you ninja edited***
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Indeed I did...

Thats the issue in the end, if you're talking about international connections or any of the many countries without ethernet based backhaul networks then WAN accelerators make sense. A 2Mbit link between australia and new zealand would likely cost much more than 100Mbit from london to manchester.

In the UK, where there are multiple providers with a decent ethernet backbone, upgrading the connection is simpler and cheaper.
 
There's still the problem of affordability if you don't live in or near a city though?

We don't have the greatest connections around this way :(
 
Wardie said:
There's still the problem of affordability if you don't live in or near a city though?

We don't have the greatest connections around this way :(
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To an extent thats true, if you're so remote you can't get SDSL you may have a problem and then accelerators would seem to make sense.
 
Well, we aren't right out in the sticks but the connectivity isn't great.

Don't you work for an ISP? I'd be interested to see the cost of upgrading our line, but i'm fairly certain it'll cost an arm and a leg. (Location = Barrow-In-Furness).

I've seen a few positive comments made about Riverbed solutions.

Packeteer seems to offer optimisation and acceleration. The more reading I do regarding this and from general life experience, all-in-ones never offer as good of a product as specifically designed ones, they are just more affordable.

Thanks for the replies it's aprpeciated :)
 
Wardie said:
Well, we aren't right out in the sticks but the connectivity isn't great.

Don't you work for an ISP? I'd be interested to see the cost of upgrading our line, but i'm fairly certain it'll cost an arm and a leg. (Location = Barrow-In-Furness).

I've seen a few positive comments made about Riverbed solutions.

Packeteer seems to offer optimisation and acceleration. The more reading I do regarding this and from general life experience, all-in-ones never offer as good of a product as specifically designed ones, they are just more affordable.

Thanks for the replies it's aprpeciated :)
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I do but quoting for out of london locations requires speaking to carriers for line costs unfortunately. I suspect it'd be a lot though.

Riverbed gave us an eval unit last year and I wasn't terribly impressed, performance about 5% worse than the juniper and not as good to manage. Your mileage may vary of course...

All in ones are rarely as good, I'm currently evaluating IDP systems and the options built into firewalls are pretty rubbish compared to purpose designed IDP platforms...
 
We use riverbed for remote workers on laptop/3g datacards and a few remote sites stuck on ISDN. Works well, but I wouldn't use it throughout the network
 
Ahh no problem.

Juniper does generally seem to do things better than most. I may be wrong and i'll do so digging, but I can't see any WAN acceleration/optimisation hardware or software other than what we have implemented really offering that much more. I suppose there comes a point when you simply HAVE to upgrade your WAN link.

All of the technology we've been discussing deals with data as the final stage (the wan out link), is there nothing which helps increase LAN/WAN performance by compressing data better at the source (the user device)?

Sorry for all the questions, i'm a curious one and i'm just getting started with networking :)
 
rick827 said:
We use riverbed for remote workers on laptop/3g datacards and a few remote sites stuck on ISDN. Works well, but I wouldn't use it throughout the network
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I've just been looking at that, the Mobile product stuff they offer?

How have you found it? We have had issues with slowness when working remotely and this could be quite beneficial.

Did it offer a noticeable performance increase for mobile users?
 
We've just finished evaluating Juniper networks stuff and are currently evaluating Riverbed.

What we've seen with riverbed is fantastic. The reduction of trafic we're seeing is everything they say it will do. CIFS, HTTP, MAPI etc are often reduced to 20% or less of what they were. It's not about compression with riverbed, its about traffic pattern caching. Watching a 40meg file copy between sites in 2 seconds is scary (of course, best case 100 cached).

Very clever and so far, it's proving considerably more impressive than Juniper networks.
 
Any comparisons of systems compared to packeteer?

Riverbed mobile looks like it could be quite promising as remote working can be slow..
 
Just to bump this, does anyone thing the cost difference between Riverbed and Packeteer can be really justified? Especially if you were going to move from Packeteer to Riverbed or Juniper?

Also, have any of you got any idea how these fair with VoIP thrown into the mix?
 
I'm not sure how it would fair well with VoIP, but depending on the compression VoIP isn't all that big, just delay sensitive.

For example, if you use g.729 that brings your payload to around 8k, the packet header is massive compared to the payload, so the real benifit is in header compression - this should bring the packet size down considerably, if you couple that with a queuing and QOS strategy, I'd suggest LLQ, which is CBWFQ as v-spec suggested, but with a priority queue, this meens that the voice is processed, but the other traffic isn't starved.
(I've been reading Cisco books lately!:p)
 
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