WAAS anyone using this? 1

[Gardener1]

We will demo the Cisco WAAS between three site starting next week I would like to know:

How your roll out went?

Did you notice any improvement?

what are the problems to look out for?

how did you test the current network setup and then how did you test the WAAS to see if it was any faster?

Does anyone know of a less expensive way of accelerating internal bandwidth?

Thanks in advance?

 

[unclerico]

Does anyone know of a less expensive way of accelerating internal bandwidth?

yeah, don't use Cisco WAAS lol...all joking aside, I've never used the WAAS product but I have used both Riverbed and Silver-Peak WOC's and they can make a huge difference depending on what applications you have running. We also have three sites and implemented the Silver-Peak solution mainly because it is the most flexible solution on the market in terms of the applications that it can optimize/accelerate since it operates at layer 3 whereas the other guys operate at layers 4 - 7.

In terms of getting a performance baseline you really need to do simple things like download a large file from one site to another. FTP some documents around. The most imporant thing is user perception so find your most demanding users and have them gauge the performance. An example that I have is we have a user that maintains SOP's for our org. The documents are stored in MS Word format and the average size is roughly 1MB. When this user would try to make changes and save them it would take a few minutes for the changes to save (we have T1 links between sites). Even Microsoft says that accessing Office documents directly over a WAN is not recommended because of the overhead involved; they recommend a DFS solution, SharePoint, or a duplication of file storage at all locations. Once we implemented the Silver-Peak appliance the lag time was almost nothing. The basic operation of these devices is of course that the first time a file is accessed it will take the usual amount of time for it to transfer, however, subsequent access to the same file should be virtually instantaneous (this depends on how much storage your solution has as it FIFO is typically used when storage limits are reached).

One last thing is hitting on what I said earlier about the layer of operation. Procuring a device that is agnostic in terms of the upper layer protocols (TCP/UDP, MAPI, HTTP, etc.) will scale a hell of a lot better than one that will require firmware upgrades the next time a new version of an application comes out. Two of the big ones are MAPI and Citrix acceleration. Like I said before the Silver-Peak appliance operates at layer 3 so it doesn't care if the application uses TCP or UDP or whether it is MAPI 2003, 2007, or 2010. It also accelerates Citrix which most of the other guys can't. Also, the other guys typically cannot optimize UDP traffic (i.e. voice and video). We have proven that the Silver-Peak can do this (some of the other guys claim it to be impossible) with our Tandberg video conferencing system (we are in the discovery phase of a VoIP implementation). Even though most of the protocols/compression built-in to the voice/video devices do a good job we saw a huge difference in video quality once we put the Silver-Peak on the network.

Our roll out?? 15 minutes for each silver-peak device, tops (this does not include travel time to each site lol). The learning curve is next to nothing which is a HUGE benefit since we have a small IT staff and we are all expected to know everything about every piece of equipment in our environment. To be fair the Riverbed appliances are extremely simple to use also.

I do NOT work for Silver-Peak in any capacity. I am just a very satisfied customer who is very impressed with their offerings because they do what they say they can do. The big thing is their support is very responsive even after the POC is over. If you contact Silver-Peak about a POC be sure to ask for Fred and tell 'em Dennis sent you lol then he'll owe me some Fogo de Chao

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