WX Application Acceleration Platforms
The Juniper Networks WX platforms provide distributed enterprises with a cost-effective solution for accelerating applications over the WAN. Based on the unique WX Framework, which integrates all the elements required to optimize application performance, the WX platforms help high-performance businesses improve application response times, maximize WAN performance and control and prioritize key applications.
The WX platforms improve application performance over the WAN by eliminating redundant transmissions, accelerating TCP and application-specific protocols, prioritizing and allocating access to bandwidth, and ensuring high availability at sites with multiple WAN links.
The WX platforms communicate constantly to provide distributed stateful intelligence about the entire network, exchanging vital information such as topology, reachability, and path-performance metrics. The WX platforms also interoperate with the Juniper Networks WXC application acceleration platforms, contributing to a complete, integrated WAN optimization solution.
The WX platforms can be deployed and configured in just 10 minutes using a Web-based installation wizard. The WXOS and WX Central Management System software also enable fully automated configuration; IT simply defines centralized configuration templates and, when remote WX platforms boot up, they retrieve a network address, locate the WX CMS server through the domain name service (DNS), download their configuration file, and begin operation.
Benefits
The WX and WXC platforms enable organizations to realize a range of business and technical benefits. With these application acceleration devices, enterprises can:
- increase bandwidth,
- gain visibility,
- reduce costs, and
- consolidate servers.
Increase Bandwidth
Enterprise businesses of all kinds struggle to balance the competing demands of cost containment and increased network traffic. Since WAN costs typically account for IT's highest expenditure after headcount, most enterprises do not have the luxury of simply adding more WAN capacity to their networks.
What accounts for the rise in bandwidth demands?
- Web-enabled applications. These architectures typically increase bandwidth tenfold compared to client-server architectures performing the same transaction.
- Broader proliferation of applications.In the past, fewer workers within a business accessed any given application, while today many more employees across many more sites need access to the same application.
- Global integration. While businesses used to tolerate a delay in receiving information from far-flung locations, most enterprises today demand that even the most remote sites be tightly integrated into the business processes.
- Richer content. E-mail and other communications used to be text only, but today's workers think nothing of attaching 5 MB PowerPoint files and extensive Excel spreadsheets to their messages.
- Increased interaction with voice and video. While networks used to serve up data-only files, more businesses now use their WAN links to carry critical voice and video communications.
The Solution
Juniper Networks is focused on optimizing the WAN to improve application performance - increasing the available bandwidth across a link is part of that solution. The WX and WXC application acceleration platforms include reduction techniques to enable greater throughput over the WAN. The company's Molecular Sequence Reduction (MSR) technique, available on the WX and WXC platforms, stores patterns in memory and, when it sees a repeated pattern, sends a simple flag across the WAN rather than the full data pattern, reducing WAN traffic by 50 to 80 percent.
The WXC platforms support a second reduction technique, Network Sequence Caching, which augments MSR compression with hard-disk-based pattern storage. The Sequence Caching techniquestores longer data patterns and stores them for a longer period of time. This approach allows the WXC platforms to eliminate redundancies even when a file has been modified or when it was last seen weeks previously. The Sequence Caching technique provides compression results as high as 80 percent to 98 percent.
With WX and WXC platforms, IT can cost-effectively increase the available bandwidth on their existing WAN links.
Gain Visibility
WANs have traditionally proven hard to monitor. They don't provide an easy place for instrumentation, and IT departments can rarely cost-justify the purchase of probes and other monitoring devices.
But it's crucial for a business to understand what's traversing the WAN. Key functions such as troubleshooting and network planning rely on an understanding of WAN traffic. Among the parameters that enterprises need to monitor are:
- Application performance.
IT must have an at-a-glance view of how key applications are performing across the WAN and whether additional optimization is required. - Application mix.
Businesses need to know what traffic is running across the WAN and to which sites. - Top talkers.
Seeing which users, applications, or sites are consuming the available WAN capacity is critical to troubleshooting, forming a QOS policy, and performing capacity planning. - The impact of QOS.
When QOS is invoked, the WAN is throttling one application in favor of another, and IT must understand how that restricted application is performing. - Packet size distribution.
This information is critical to detecting anomalies and understanding bandwidth consumption. - Control logs.
Without this kind of data, IT cannot tune the WAN settings.
The Solution
WX and WXC application acceleration platforms support a broad range of visibility and control mechanisms to make the WAN a much better managed entity. Because the WX and WXC platforms typically reside on both ends of a WAN link, IT gains complete visibility into those links and can see summary or detailed information across a pervasive WAN acceleration deployment.
The WX and WXC platforms provide extensive reporting-both on a device level in WebView, which is built into the platforms, and across a system of WX and WXC platforms through the WX Central Management System (CMS) software. More than any other single feature of the WX Framework, WX CMS is tightly woven into every other feature, providing IT with aggregated reporting of WAN and application performance and control over the parameters that affect business policies.
The software helps IT learn the mix of applications running over the WAN and how much bandwidth they're consuming, which users are consuming the greatest amount of bandwidth, and how QOS is affecting application throughput. These top talker and other reports help IT quickly pinpoint anomalies in the network, identify whether the WAN is the culprit during application performance problems, and troubleshoot problems that have historically been tough to diagnose given the lack of WAN insight.
WX CMS also highlights the benefits of each element of the WX Framework. It enables IT to manage additional WAN capacity enabled by compression, view application acceleration results, allocate bandwidth and prioritize applications, and direct applications over different WAN links. IT staff can customize the mix of reports they view by designing personal "My WAN" portals.
With WX and WXC platforms, IT can gain the complete WAN visibility needed to simplify troubleshooting and perform long-term planning.
Reduce Costs
Despite the improving business climate in most enterprises, IT is still pressed to produce economic efficiencies and cost savings. This requirement-in direct conflict with IT's mandate to provide greater services to a growing user population-means IT has to make better use of existing resources rather than increase them.
Enterprise IT organizations continue to find innovative and creative approaches to cost reduction. To save money, these businesses can:
- Avoid or delay WAN upgrades.
With WAN costs being the second-highest IT expense after staffing, WAN optimization can have a significant payback, often with an ROI of less than nine months. - Improve application response times.
By improving people's access to critical data and shortening the time needed to perform key tasks, IT can improve the business' core productivity and contribute to the bottom line. - Centralize or consolidate remote servers.
The operational and capital costs associated with managing remote servers is very high, so reducing the requirement for those remote platforms can save significant funds. - Improve troubleshooting ability.
The quicker IT can solve a problem, the more time the team has for advanced planning and other value-added tasks.
The Solution
The WX and WXC application acceleration platforms provide a number of hard- and soft-dollar savings to IT organizations. Where WX and WXC platforms enable a business to avoid a WAN upgrade in support of a new application, for example, the ROI can be as short as four to six months. For enterprises where bandwidth savings are not the attraction, productivity gains the WX and WXC platforms provide in the form of application acceleration can contribute to improving the bottom line.
For some businesses, regulatory issues or cost concerns drive the need for server consolidation. The performance gains enabled by the WX and WXC platforms ensure that remote users get the application response times and throughput they need to perform their jobs, even when they're accessing resources across the WAN. Ultimately, the additional WAN visibility provided by the WX and WXC platforms reduce troubleshooting time for IT staff, enabling them to spend more time on long-range network planning and design.
With WX and WXC platforms, IT can finally provide both improved network services and lower costs to the business.
Consolidate Servers
Poor application performance across the WAN has driven the deployment of remote servers to provide e-mail and other critical file services in remote offices. While users enjoy the improved application response times that local servers provide, these remote servers create a range of IT problems. Chief among the issues are:
- Regulatory compliance.
More enterprises have determined that centralizing key data, such as e-mail records, is essential to adhering to regulatory demands. - Backup of key data.
Relying on non-IT staff in branch offices to perform critical backup functions, such as nightly tape backups, has proven unreliable. - Patch and other software updates.
Maintaining current software revisions and patch updates on a range of disparate remote servers is cumbersome, costly, and time-consuming. - Troubleshooting.
Diagnosing and solving problems on remote devices takes more time and slows system recovery.
Server consolidation has its obvious benefits, and the move toward it is clearly underway, but IT organizations embarking on such a project must ensure that remote users will retain key application functionality. The fundamental WAN characteristics that slow application performance over WAN links haven't changed, so IT must address those limitations to ensure acceptable application performance when remote users access centralized servers.
The Solution
The WX and WXC application acceleration platforms help maintain application performance as users in remote offices access file and other servers in centralized locations. The company provides a suite of integrated features in its WX Framework to enhance application performance.
First, MSR compression and Sequence Caching store repeated data patterns and replace them with flags for transmission across the WAN. As a result, data takes much less time to traverse the WAN.
Most importantly, the WX and WXC platforms provide application acceleration to speed response times for users. The company's Packet Flow Acceleration (PFA) technologies provide broad-based TCP acceleration, which increases application throughput by reducing the impact of latency on any TCP-based application. More dramatically, the WX and WXC platforms support Application Flow Acceleration (AppFlow) techniques that speed Exchange, Microsoft file services, and web applications. These techniques overcome the protocol constraints that limit the throughput of those applications, enabling the WX and WXC platforms to pipeline large data blocks or multiple web objects across the WAN at one time. As a result, users see anywhere from 2x to 3x performance gains on web to as high as 30x to 50x gains on Exchange and file services.
Finally, IT can improve application performance for remote users by applying the QOS and other bandwidth-management features. These easy-to-use, template-based tools let IT define QOS policies in simple wizards, making it quick and easy to apply application prioritization policies across the enterprise.
With WX and WXC platforms to accelerate applications, server consolidation can make for happy IT and happy users.
