How can Network Acceleration Products and Solutions enhance your network and applications performanc
If we contemplate on the term “network acceleration”, we can figure out that any hardware, software or service developed to render this type of network solution will certainly require intensive software programming and network protocol management techniques on part of the developer. But what do we mean exactly by network acceleration?
Here’s a classic definition of “network accelerator” from TechTarget.com:
The appliance, which can be a physical hardware component, software program, or an appliance running in a virtualized environment, speeds up the time it takes for information to flow back and forth across the WAN by using compression and data deduplication techniques to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted.
For those terms in bold letters, we will go over some specific products and solutions to better understand how they work. For those underlined phrases, we will try to connect the dots between these networking concepts. Let’s connect the dots first.
What stuffs can be accelerated over a network? These are the applications or apps, files, web contents, media and other data formats.
What are the specific techniques used to reduce or compressed the amount of data? These could be any of the following: symmetric adaptive compression, content concatenation, minification, image optimization, data streamlining, deduplication, or any combination of them.
What are the approaches to speed up the flow time? These could be via SSL acceleration, bandwidth management, traffic shaping, TCP optimization, dynamic content control, data caching, HTTP optimization, WAN path controller, load balancing, protocol spoofing, forward error correction, or any combination of them.
From the above methods or techniques, we can confirm that any software designed to accelerate data transmission or flow must conform to protocols governing file transfer, security, hosting and business policies. It is also indicative that companies providing these kinds of solutions have the goal of overcoming network latency, maximizing server capacity, reducing the bandwidth, speeding up application response time, and improving the Quality of Service (QoS).
This time, let’s briefly examine the network acceleration and optimization products and solutions offered by a few well-trusted companies in this industry.
F5 Networks – BIG-IP Application Acceleration Manager (AAM)
Available as a virtual software solution or as a standalone hardware appliance, BIG-IP AAM is running on F5’s TMOS operating system. It is designed to overcome network, protocol, and application issues present on cloud, mobile applications, web applications and video distribution channels. Some of its core features are symmetric adaptive compression, HTTP 2.0 and SPDY gateway, dynamic compression and the easy-to-use performance dashboard.
CDNetworks – Dynamic Network Acceleration (DNA)
DNA is a managed service solution designed to accelerate web-based, desktop and on-premise enterprise applications (like ERP and CRM) transmitted over SSL-VPN. DNA ensures data and application integrity over both internal LANs and the public internet by applying state-of-the-art acceleration techniques such as non-intrusive packet handling, PCI-compliant protocols (for e-Commerce sites), and dynamic web acceleration at the transport layer to SSL-VPN supported applications.
Riverbed – SteelHead for SaaS Acceleration
SteelHead SaaS is a service solution that helps IT in managing SaaS applications by increasing the service availability based on user demand. The solution is originally designed for Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.com cloud services. It enables faster access and response times to these applications whenever a user uploads or downloads files and emails. Riverbed uses multiple optimization techniques such as data streamlining, application streamlining, and internet optimization in order to accelerate the delivery of these business-critical applications. Riverbed also offers SteelHead CX 70 hardware appliance and SteelHead 9.0 software application.
From these network acceleration solutions, we can say that there is really a wide array of data compression, transmission acceleration and network optimization methods and techniques that can be used. This only implies that whether the client is a datacenter, a small business or a virtual company, there is a solution that can exactly fit into their requirements. In fact, there are now low-cost software applications available for download from different app stores.
Bottom line, in order to improve the efficiency of network infrastructure, optimize the delivery of application and enhance end users experience, an organization who wishes to invest on this kind of solution must fully understand the relative level of implementation, extent of support services, and product’s overall capability offered by the provider.
