When discussing topics associated with WAN virtualization and optimization, the conversation tends to focus on the details of the technology and the how. How does load-balancing work? How can I prioritize traffic? How quickly does the failover occur? These specifics are important when evaluating WAN solutions, but in many businesses it’s not just technical personnel who have a stake in the decision making process. It’s important for decision makers at all levels to understand the benefits of new WAN technologies and what they mean for businesses. That’s why we’re looking at some of the high level benefits of WAN virtualization and optimization in a way that’s accessible for all stakeholders.

For every business, it’s most important to understand how critical WAN connectivity has become to everyday productivity. While specific applications vary from business to business, it’s important to be aware of how many services utilize WAN technology to function. This might be as simple as email or general web access, but as more companies move services to the cloud it’s typical that other functions that may have been hosted on internal servers in the past to now utilize WAN connectivity. Examples of this are hosted CRM solutions, transaction processing and document sharing within the organization. Losing access to those resources brings productivity-- and revenue-- to a screeching halt.

Conversely, companies that host some or all of their own servers have different, but equally important, concerns. As employees become more mobile, access to company resources via remote desktop or VPNs is considered vital. Access from external users such as vendors or customers becomes essential as well. The uptime and visibility of public-facing services like email, web servers and e-commerce reflects back on the experience of the organization significantly in the eyes of partners and customers. Organizations with multiple locations must maintain effective connectivity between work sites, especially if resources are concentrated at data center locations.

It’s not just about failover, either. Failover is only one piece of the larger puzzle. It’s about effective connectivity, not just connectivity. Both rely on redundancy and a way manage and automate that failover process to the point where traffic is never interrupted and users are never down.

As important as connectivity is it is important to take a broader view of WAN virtualization and optimization and why effective connectivity and application performance should be taken into account. Let’s look at an example. A company has two connections for redundancy purposes. On a day-to-day basis, they load-balance over the two circuits and thereby avoid slowdowns due to congestion. At some point, however, one of the connections fails. Fortunately, the company has two connections, so they still have connectivity. However, all of the traffic now utilizes that single connection. Again, normally the traffic may be load-balanced over both taking advantage of the broader pool of available bandwidth – but now it’s all utilizing just one connection. This situation could be almost as bad as being down completely. With all the traffic-- critical and not-- going out the same connection, slowdowns make doing business frustrating at best.

This is where the ideas of effective connectivity and application performance come in. Having redundant access is important, but each circuit should be optimized to prioritize and allocate bandwidth resources to critical traffic so that the connectivity remains effective for your business even if you’re temporarily dealing with diminished bandwidth resources.

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With today’s WAN technologies, you can create rules that guarantee your critical traffic-- like e-mail, access to your CRM, VPNs to vendors, remote user access, just to name a few-- gets the necessary bandwidth and priority, allowing the business to better handle the outage until full service is restored.

WAN virtualization and optimization can mean many things, but these are the basics. Understanding these concepts and how they can affect a business for disaster avoidance and recovery underscores the value of WAN optimization for any business that relies on effective connectivity for business operations. Today, that’s most of us.

John Addington is a field applications engineer at Ecessa (News - Alert), a company that designs and manufactures networking hardware for constant and seamless Internet connectivity for businesses. John is a passionate technologist who specializes IP Networking and in driving understanding of new technical concepts with stakeholders at every level. John can show the value of technology solutions at a high level and delve into technical minutiae and esoteric scenarios for specific needs and interests.