WAN
WAN
A wide area network or WAN is a computer network covering a wide geographical area, involving a vast array of computers. This is different from personal area networks (PANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs) or local area networks (LANs) that are usually limited to a room, building or campus. The most well-known example of a WAN is the Internet.
WANs are used to connect local area networks (LANs) together, so that users and computers in one location can communicate with users and computers in other locations. Many WANs are built for one particular organization and are private. Others, built by Internet service providers, provide connections from an organization's LAN to the Internet.
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WAN Related Products
McAfee UTM Firewall (formerly Secure Computing SnapGear) is a complete office network-in-a-box Internet security appliance for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). It features wide-area networking tools that you would normally only see with enterprise-class devices. Because the last thing SMBs need is another single-purpose security appliance to add to their network.
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The Inter-Business Vault enables the creation of secure instant wide area networks (WANs) for connecting enterprises with partners, customers and sub-contractors over the Internet - enabling them to exchange information as if they have deployed a shared WAN, but without actually doing so.
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Idealstor Ibac for Windows is a data protection software solution for the most demanding business needs. Its scalability, performance, and reliability make it an ideal backup solution for enterprise networks.
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The Blue Coat SG810 Series represents the ultimate in a 1U rackmount proxy appliance platform. The 810 series is purpose-built, providing flexible control with wire-speed performance with up to 4GB of memory and 1.2TB of disk capacity. Utilizing a custom, object-based OS with integrated caching for performance, organizations can advise, coach and enforce granular policies down to individual users.
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With the same protection and acceleration features found Blue Coat's enterprise-grade SG8100 Series platform, the Blue Coat SG510 offers an affordable rack-mountable appliance solution for small enterprises and branch offices which have direct access to the Internet.
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The WXC Series Application Acceleration Platforms provide distributed enterprises with a scalable way to speed the delivery of client-server and Web-based business applications and services over the WAN.
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The Juniper Networks SSG series provide high-performance security platforms designed for everything from small branch offices to large global deployments. Ideal for stopping internal and external attacks, preventing unauthorised access and achieving regulatory compliance.
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LinkProof is a multi-WAN switch that lets you maximize the effectiveness of your WAN by bypassing bottlenecks and service-provider outages, managing bandwidth consumption, and letting you decide which links are used for which applications and when. It's the only on demand solution that fits your current and future WAN link load balancing needs and lets you effortlessly add, manage and load-balance multiple ISP connections while you mix-and-match VPNs, private and public links for back-up or in response to growing bandwidth needs.
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AEP Net is an independently assured encryptor that protects IP traffic across networks. AEP Net provides both data confidentiality and source authentication for network traffic enabling high confidence Virtual Private Network (VPN) communications. AEP's solution has a proven track record of protecting National and International classified networks.
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The AEP Net Remote extends the security, functions and features of AEP Net into the remote access domain. Like its big brother the AEP Net Remote provides both data confidentiality and source authentication for IP network traffic.
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The new Alteon Application Switches feature performance leadership and on demand scalability coupled with sophisticated load balancing capabilities including filtering and traffic management provide optimised networks uncompromised performance and value.
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Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of WAN performance across the broadest range of applications. Available in a wide range of sizes - all powered by the Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS) - Steelhead appliances are also the most scalable approach to application acceleration across your WAN.
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WAN Related Product Families
Riverbed provides the only comprehensive WAN optimisation solution to a host of severe problems that have effectively prevented enterprises from sharing applications and data across wide areas. By wide area, they mean anywhere in the world.
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WAN Related Industry News
Network managers have to do more with less IT Staff will have to be smart to support more network traffic without a corresponding increase in resources Many network managers in the UK will have to cope with a growing burden on their WAN without any increased investment in network bandwidth this year, according to a study published on Monday.
While tighter financial controls are forcing IT departments to keep a lid on network costs, cost-saving measures elsewhere may be putting more strain on th......
[more] FatPipe Beats Service Disruptions When an accidental fiber-optic cable cut disrupted businesses in greater Boston, Ardais, a clinical genomics company based in Lexington, Mass., lost connection to its service provider for nine hours. That’s when the company decided it had to add a second connection to avoid any further downtime. (For more on Ardais, see Capturing Clinical Information, Bio-IT World October 2003).
Service outages, while sporadic and of varying length, have a great impact on Arda......
[more] CyberGuard Breaks New Ground with Introduction of SG560 Security/WAN Appliance CyberGuard Corporation, a global provider of security solutions that protect the critical assets of the largest and most complex information networks for Global 2000 enterprises and government organizations, today announced the release of a feature-rich, compact, network security and Wide Area Network (WAN) connectivity device designed to secure small and medium businesses and the small branch offices of larger compa......
[more] IPsec dead by 2008, says Gartner The IPsec protocol that has served remote access so well for the last decade is now in its death throes, Gartner has prophesised.
In a new report, it predicted that by 2008, the use of IPsec will have been swept away by its younger technological rival, SSL, for much of the market. By that year, two-thirds of teleworking remote access employees - and 90 percent of casual access users - will have adopted SSL.
In the last three years, SSL has attracted three mill......
[more] Viruses still main threat to UK firms Department of Trade and Industry survey finds that viruses are still causing headaches for enterprises Companies seeking to contain security incidents should concentrate on viruses, according to the Department of Trade and Industry's twice yearly Information Security Breaches survey. The telephone survey of 1,000 companies, led by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, fingers viruses as being the cause of over half of the worst security incidents hitting UK firms in t......
[more] PatchLink Issues Patch Tuesday Preparation Guide PatchLink Corporation, the global leader for security patch and vulnerability management solutions, today issued comprehensive best practice guidelines to help organizations prepare for what has become a notoriously stressful IT day, Patch Tuesday. While Patch Tuesday is often the cause of many late nights testing and applying patches, organizations face a continuous onslaught of vulnerabilities and patches that can adversely affect IT infrastruc......
[more] Devices let admin staff fine-tune app delivery Blue Coat is upgrading its Mach5 application acceleration architecture for its SG series of WAN optimisation appliances. This will allow more granular bandwidth management to improve quality of service (QoS).Blue Coat vice-president Nigel Hawthorn said, "This gives IT managers the option to base prioritisation decisions on business processes rather than the normal recourse to servers and protocols."For instance, if users are running Oracl......
[more] SSL traffic clogging WANs, says vendor An increasing percentage of WAN traffic is now SSL-encrypted, which is posing problems for WAN optimisation systems, according to a survey of over 1,300 IT professionals. According to the survey, sponsored by Blue Coat Systems, 53 percent of enterprises have SSL-enabled applications now, 45 percent plan to use them over the next year, and for 35 percent, SSL already represents at least a quarter of their WAN traffic. Almost two-thirds of those surveyed sai......
[more] Firms face disaster over WAN bottlenecks Two-thirds of large enterprises don't have enough bandwidth to replicate or backup their remote sites in an emergency, according to a survey of IT managers and directors. IT managers simply don't have enough bandwidth to meet the demands of their disaster recovery plans, and most of them will find a big chunk of their sites isolated in a disaster, according to the report, produced by Forrester Consulting, and commissioned by F5 Networks. But the answer m......
[more] Blue Coat Upgrades SG Appliances The new SGOS software makes WAN optimisation ready for mainstream enterprise deployments. Blue Coat Systems, a company in secure content and application delivery, has announced a major software upgrade for its family of SG appliances for WAN optimisation. The software release makes WAN optimisation ready for mainstream enterprise deployments by enabling it to integrate with existing network infrastructure and operations, provide expanded clustering and failover o......
[more] Korea Stock Exchange Selects Blue Coat for WAN Optimization Blue Coat SG Appliances Accelerate Critical Applications Two Times Faster, Reduce Bandwidth Consumption 400-500 Percent Blue Coat Systems the leader in secure content and application delivery, today announced that the Korea Stock Exchange (KRX) has deployed Blue Coat(R) SG(TM) appliances to accelerate critical applications across its Wide Area Network (WAN) while reducing overall bandwidth consumption. The solution has solved significan......
[more] FatPipe WARP Helps Internet Business Achieve Always-Up Internet Availability to Customers and Retailers The Internet business Shoplocal announced this month that it has attained Internet reliability and redundancy, thanks to FatPipe Networks, (www.fatpipeinc.com) the inventor of router clustering devices for reliable, redundant and high speed Internet WAN connections. Shoplocal is an online shopping and advertising company made up of more than 200 affiliate media, search and shopping sites that......
[more] FatPipe Networks Is Granted a 5th Patent for Wide Area Network/Internet Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery FatPipe Networks(TM), the inventor and multiple patents holder of WAN optimization, redundancy and security products, announced today that it has successfully secured its fifth patent. The US patent number 7,269,143 protects the "tools and techniques used to combine routers to increase concurrency and redundancy in external network access," such as the Internet and other W......
[more] Blue Coat: We Grow One Packet at a Time As enterprises become even more distributed and even more applications are delivered over an IP address, the need for more speed and application visibility becomes even more paramount. It's quite a market opportunity for vendors, and Network equipment vendor Blue Coat Systems has a plan to capture a big chunk of it, thanks in part to its recent acquisition of Packeteer. During a recent interview, Blue Coat CEO Brian NeSmith said he is confident that his......
[more] Juniper's New WXC Appliances: 'More Box For The Money' Juniper Networks Monday added three new appliances to its WXC application acceleration platform, offering higher disk capacities and performance in a smaller form factor. According to Juniper, the three additions—the WXC 1800, WXC 2600 and WXC 3400 appliances—give solution providers more options in offering their customers more scalable, modular and cost-effective application response across the WAN for uninterrupted and accelerated applicat......
[more] BT deploys Blue Coat ProxySG appliances to protects its corporate network from Web 2.0 threats The use of social networking sites has soared over recent years, with an estimated 64 million people worldwide using the technology for both social and work related purposes. For many employers, an outright ban of such sites is simply not realistic and a growing number are now actively embracing the use of networking sites and other Web 2.0 tools such as P2P (Peer to Peer) and Wikis in order to encoura......
[more] Bluecoat Wan accelerator speeds up Kettering NHS' Pacs Kettering General Hospital has deployed network acceleration technology from Blue Coat to enable it to send large X-ray images electronically between sites using the NHS Picture Archiving and Communications System (Pacs). The Trust has used ProxySG wide area network optimisation appliance from Blue Coat to decrease the time taken to load Pacs images, such as CT scans and X-Rays, from minutes to second. X-ray images, which would have previou......
[more] San Francisco hunts for mystery device on city network With costs related to an alleged rogue network administrator's hijacking of the city's network now estimated at $1 million, San Francisco officials say they are searching for a mysterious networking device hidden somewhere on the network. The device, referred to as a "terminal server" in court documents, appears to be a router that was installed to provide remote access to the city's Fiber WAN network, which connects municipal co......
[more] Secure Web gateway for effective data loss prevention in an SSL world Businesses are increasingly moving to SSL-encrypted traffic on their network for greater security and data protection. In fact, in 2007, Enterprise Strategy Group estimated that SSL-encrypted application deployments had increased by 50 to 55 percent. However, more SSL traffic on the network inhibits the effectiveness of a data loss prevention solution. In response to this new application profile that favors SSL traffic, organ......
[more] What has happened to storage security? It would be an overstatement to suggest that the state of storage security has declined in the past year, but it's fair to say that it's lost some momentum. While everyone on the planet is now aware of privacy concerns and specifically the widely publicized risk of off-site tape loss, only a relatively small number of companies have acted to mitigate the situation. Certainly there have been technology advances, including the availability of tape drive e......
[more] Denbighshire secures net traffic with Websense Denbighshire County Council has upgraded to Websense’s Web Security Gateway to provide safe internet access to its 3,500 schools, libraries and corporate users. The primary concern of the council is to protect its network from web-based threats. In addition, the Web Security Gateway is expected to help the council get Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSx) accreditation. GCSx accreditation is a private WAN which enables secure interactions betwe......
[more] Blue Coat helps Kettering hospital transmit images on WAN Kettering General Hospital has deployed Blue Coat Systems’ ProxySG appliances to transmit X-ray and MRI scan images to other healthcare providers through WAN. ProxySG appliances, built on SG operating system, provide a proxy platform architecture to protect web traffic and accelerate the delivery of business applications. The appliances have enabled the hospital to implement picture archiving and communications system (PACS). With PACS m......
[more] Getting network baselining right While simple in concept, network baselining is often misunderstood. Baselining involves recording network traffic and performance, saving it for future reference and/or reviewing it to see traffic patterns. Once baselines are saved, they can be used as a benchmark with which to compare other traffic patterns. The technique provides the network administrator insight into expected behavior on the network and subsequently, the ability to notice changes. People ofte......
[more] Adopting VOIP without unnecessary risk to your organisation For many years, voice over IP (VOIP) has held the promise of enabling the next generation of voice communications within the enterprise. Unfortunately, its adoption has been slowed; sometimes by the reality of poor performing WAN application, in other cases by perceptions that (VOIP) technology is not quite ready for the mainstream market. These problems, both real and imagined, have forced IT organisations and (VOIP) vendors to take a......
[more] How Does WAN Optimization Work? WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) can breathe new life into slow wide area network links, relieving congestion, speeding up file transfers and making applications more responsive. But how exactly do vendors like Riverbed Technology, Juniper Networks, Blue Coat Systems and Expand Networks get their devices to work their magic? To answer this question, consider the two fundamental problems that WAN links present: They have limited capacity, so they can beco......
[more] Blue Coat looks to streamline WAN optimization rollouts Blue Coat Systems is aiming for instant gratification with a new configuration wizard designed to help IT professionals get their ProxySG appliances up and running quickly. The streamlined setup executes a baseline WAN optimization configuration, including the ability to accelerate remote file access (utilizing CIFS), e-mail and Web-based applications. The wizard enables setup in less than a minute, says Carrie Oakes, vice president of......
[more] Juniper wraps remote types in security blanket Juniper has stretched its enterprise security mechanisms to better protect all those machines logging into corporate networks from remote locations. Dubbed Juniper Networks Adaptive Threat Management Solutions, the new offering automatically deploys anti-malware and anti-spyware tools to remote clients tapping the network via VPN, while affording additional protection by way of an updated intrusion-prevention system (IPS). And in an effort to ensure......
[more] Blue Coat launches new Virtual WAN Optimisation products WAN optimisation and security firm Blue Coat Systems today announced the launch of a new range of Virtual WAN Optimisation appliances designed to help firms consolidate their IT infrastructure and improve the delivery of business applications. Mark Urban, senior director of product marketing, explained that the new products will enable firms to meet a number of growing challenges in the enterprise space."As firms run more application......
[more] Users find the secrets of WAN optimization While the benefits of WAN optimization are well documented - better application performance for example, - finding the right gear can address unrelated business goals. Blue Coat user Michael Shisko, the director of IT for Hitachi Consulting, said his company started looking for WAN optimization gear when it switched from an Internet VPN to a hub-and-spoke MPLS WAN service. Shisko said while 60% to 70% of the company's VPN traffic was ineligible for op......
[more] World Cup streaming to choke corporate networks, doomsayers predict Every World Cup and major sporting event since France 98, if not before, has come accompanied by dire predictions of networking doom. This time around Nigel Hawthorn, EMEA VP Marketing at security appliance firm Blue Coat, was the prime source of an article FIFA World Cup: the world's biggest ever DoS?. Hawthorn predicted: "Networks will fail because of World Cup streaming. If it doesn't happen, I'll eat my replica shirt." Hawt......
[more] Security-as-a-service growing When you ask IT professionals if they use cloud computing or software-as-a-service, most start by saying "no". But if you ask some follow up questions, you will quickly find out about "that one application" that is a SaaS application. In security, this effect is even more pronounced. Companies don't think they use security-as-a-service or "cloud" security. Yet, many do, in the form of messaging security: e-mail antispam and antivirus. T......
[more] Blue Coat claims world-first with Flash addition Blue Coat Systems has claimed a world-first in offering the ability to "stream-split" video delivered live with Adobe Flash technology. The feature forms part of an Optimised Video Delivery service that the vendor is now offering in the Blue Coat ProxySG WAN optimisation product. The stream-split technology enables a single video stream to serve a large number of viewers, while freeing up bandwidth over a WAN for other critical applicati......
[more] Riverbed targets network admins with RiOS 6.5 update Riverbed Technology has unveiled an update for its RiOS wide area network (WAN) optimisation platform. The company said that the RiOS 6.5 update allows the company's WAN optimisation appliances to better identify different types of traffic, and manage network bandwidth access for various applications and processes. Nik Rouda, director of solutions marketing at Riverbed, told V3.co.uk that the Steelhead network appliances will be able to better......
[more] Blue Coat heads to the cloud Security and WAN optimisation vendor Blue Coat Systems has announced the launch of Blue Coat Cloud Service, a new platform for delivering its security products. The first part of Cloud Service to see the light of day is the Web Security Module, which Blue Coat claims can provide real-time protection from web threats. It can be deployed and managed from anywhere in the world, which will benefit companies with a dispersed workforce relying heavily on portable devices,......
[more] Blue Coat aims for public cloud WAN optimisation Blue Coat is aiming to fill a gap in the wide access network (WAN) optimisation field with software that gives IT administrators more control over virtual machine management in public clouds. Its latest CloudCaching Engine for the MACH5 WAN Optimisation system, for physical and virtual appliances, is designed to give IT managers control over corporate systems interfacing with the cloud. "Performance can be slowed by things like document acces......
[more] Riverbed releases WAN cloud storage gateway appliances Riverbed Technology today released three new gateway appliances that use WAN acceleration algorithms in order to reduce the bandwidth required to send data to public or private cloud infrastructures. Prior to the release of its new Whitewater-510, Whitewater-710 and Whitewater-2010 appliances, Riverbed's Steelhead acceleration technology required two appliances on either end of a WAN connection to replicate data. Now, the company said, one b......
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