Accelerating Your Whole Business: Why Focus On A Single Application?

When you think about improving the performance of certain data intensive applications running across your WAN, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of focusing too tightly on that specific case at the expense of taking a wider view of your WAN usage.

For example, many backup and disaster recovery applications now boast basic WAN acceleration technologies such as block-level caching and compression to their feature sets as a means of reducing their load on your network. While this, on its own, is a good step forwards it only works on traffic generated by the backup application itself – your network file sharing (CIFS), exchange email and SQL traffic won’t see any benefit. It also means spending money on feature unlocking licenses or whole new product versions just to improve that one application.

If you were to deploy WAN Optimisation units from Sangfor on each side of your WAN, not only would you be accelerating and optimising your backup solution - often with better results, especially in block-level caching since our units work on blocks as small as 512 bytes verses the 1Mb block limit present in many backup applications – but you can also accelerate these common business applications at the same time without extra costs:

• Network File Sharing (CIFS)
• SQL
• Veeam
• Netapp
• Anti-virus software such as Sophos Anti-virus and Kaspersky
• Microsoft Exchange – without sacrificing encryption between client and server!
• Remote Desktop
• Citrix
• Backup Exec
• Acronis
• Windows System Update Services
• Sharepoint
• Office Intranets – whether in-house, bespoke or off the shelf
• File Maker
• Windows Deployment Services/Linux based PXE OS installation
• And many more...

By extending WAN optimisation to a network level rather than on a per application basis, you can realise significant performance improvements across the board without embarking on costly upgrades and the often lengthy project management of those upgrades.
Since our units are independent of the applications used in your business, you can gain additional benefits such as using our bandwidth management features to enforce Quality of Service (QoS) policies, regular report generation to give you detailed views on WAN usage and even extend optimisation to mobile users.

There is another aspect of IT that can benefit from having a dedicated WAN optimisation solution – the ever changing landscape of business applications and network utilisation. As a company changes, so too will the type of software being used and the different vendors providing them. By investing heavily in any single business application it reduces the likelihood of migrating to an alternative, even if the currently employed solution is no longer fit for purpose and hampering or holding back the ability for a company to respond to changing circumstances.

A dedicated WAN optimisation solution frees you up from needing to worry about the WAN performance of the choices available to you and whether the software has its own optimisation features bundled in or at an additional cost. Your solution will already be in place, and with the ability to run reports on all of your WAN traffic you can get the best out of every application running on your network - past, present and future.