How to leverage WAN optimisation for high-performance cloud services

Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Keao Caindec.

Cost savings, convenience, speed-to-market and freedom from technology lock-ins are all benefits of migrating business applications to the cloud, and many that have already adopted cloud strategies have indeed realised significant cost savings and productivity gains. However, some have also experienced performance and availability issues that have led to resistance to migrating business-critical functions. As a result, the bulk of successful cloud projects to date have been departmental and not ‘mission critical’ core systems which have significant requirements for resource-intensive functions such as database replication, file synchronisation, backup and disaster recovery between data centres.

Part of the problem is that the public cloud ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) market is evolving more slowly than other areas such as ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS). Providers are only beginning to recognise the level to which performance levels need to be increased and the capabilities their offerings need to make them a viable platform for mission critical purposes.
One area of IaaS that providers have quickly evolved is services that support wide area networks (WAN)…

The WAN is fundamental to any globally connected service offering, dictating data transfer performance between locations. WAN performance optimisation therefore needs to be embedded as part of the cloud infrastructure. By optimising bandwidth and latency times, WAN managers can tune performance and efficiency so that data transfer times are improved and service levels to users are met consistently…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itproportal.com/2013/05/17/how-to-leverage-wan-optimisation-for-high-performance-cloud-services/