The interconnectedness of things

OS that could load on Juniper's J-series routers. "I personally think the ability to stick WAN acceleration into a router, particularly a secure router - like Cisco and Juniper are doing - is really what the mid-market seeks. A branch-in-a-box type solution," Janney said. Juniper also expects to launch a mobile client next year. Riverbed Technology already has one on the market, although Janney said reports suggested massive take-up wasn't happening just yet.

Riverbed managing director, Steve Dixon, said the wide-area data services (WDS) vendor aims to make the WAN behave just like the LAN.

Typically, WAN performance can be 100 times worse than on the LAN. When you have people on laptops dialling into the corporate network remotely, things can and often do get painfully slow, stifling productivity, and a bigger pipe won't necessarily help. Riverbed's Steelhead WDS appliances, which are Windows-based and plug into a PC, target that problem.

Dixon said one customer had very high latency over a server in its office, that took around four minutes to do some tasks. Installing an appliance and switching the WAN optimiser on immediately cut the latency down to four seconds. Operations that took 10 minutes could be cut to 15 seconds, he said.

Exinda Networks CEO, Con Nikolouzakis, said larger customers - particularly ones with 10-50 branches - were starting to see huge degradation of network performance. Australia-based Exinda offers two appliance families targeting network optimisation - the Internet-based 700 series and the WAN-focused 800 series.

Prioritisation of critical over non-critical business applications could be key, Nikolouzakis said. "We're the only vendor that offers the core technology on a single platform: application availability, application acceleration, and control and optimisation. So you're able to easily see what's going on and act accordingly," he said.

And if a customer has a large deployment, they don't need to buy different central management systems. Exinda offers Service Delivery Point, a hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering for device management via Exinda appliances and there's also direct access to an Exinda WAN optimisation community for support from other users.

"We took a similar approach to Salesforce.com," Nikolouzakis said. "The more people use it, the smarter the system gets."

Application hungry Citrix channel sales director, Phil Dean-Jones, said many customers struggled to handle Web traffic in these increasingly application-hungry times. WAN optimisation, too, was moving front-of-mind, especially as organisations grappled with less-reliable wireless networking.

Dean-Jones said Citrix Presentation Server offered improved session reliability to cope with changes in network latency or availability. NetScaler appliances offer visibility, incorporate security and are capable of accelerating application performance by a factor of five. Another product, Citrix EdgeSight, offers end-user application performance visibility.

WANScaler appliances and client software can be used as a point solution or as part of a total application delivery package for branch offices and remote users at up to 500Mbps. It lets users optimise WAN traffic using flow control, compression and other protocols as well as Citrix's own ICA protocol.

Analyst, Forrester Research, has suggested WAN optimisation demand is growing 40-50 per cent a year in Australia, according to Dean-Jones.

And it's simple to set up, he claimed.

"Some are quite complex to set up, requiring tunneling processes," Dean-Jones said. "Ours self-senses; it works pretty much out of the box." D-Link marketing director, Maurice Famularo, said small companies that couldn't afford to spend big on managing IT could also benefit from network performance solutions.

"And there are lots of remote users, needing exit-out of the system, like Internet out. And you can't just put any old switch in that environment," Famularo said. "So it's a lot about solution selling."

Famularo said D-Link's xStack switches with traffic prioritisation, QoS and Zone Defence could be useful in the right product mix, level of support and system integration. Zone Defence enables the two devices to talk to each other. If one device on a network has a problem, the switch can automatically detect it and get that part to stop interfering. A PC with a potential virus or Trojan, or a rogue access point which equally might slow things down, can also be pinpointed.

Distributed solutions US computer scientist, Leslie Lamport, once famously noted that a distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed could render your own machine unusable. Most people use distributed networks that share out the workload among clients and servers. Everything is connected, so almost everything can be a point of failure. Despite the proliferation of products and add-ons offering optimal network and application performance, therefore, the smart reseller is bound to take a holistic approach to managing the problems and challenges of the modern network.

LAN Systems SMB and Cisco business development manager, Nathan Godsall, said resellers were asking for product and training to handle this next challenge. WAN optimisation is becoming the next hot area for channel partners.

"They've got their heads around IP telephony and unified communications. They now want to address the WAN and virtualisation and QoS," he said. Larger enterprises can also benefit from deployments of service-oriented architectures (SOA), or Cisco's service-oriented network architecture (SONA), to create a setup where the network works better because resources have been freed up to do what users really want them to do - instead of the business process being based around the IT itself.

"A big part of SONA is making sure all the applications are streamlined," Godsall added.

Resource-hungry applications, such as Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, could be reined in.

Getting efficient Centralisation of applications and other resources in itself didn't help, because the moment anything has to run across the WAN, traffic slows. Things like Cisco's Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) could also assist, while virtualisation or anything that helps the network run more efficiently, with better resource utilisation, also provides gains, Godsall noted.

"It's all about survivability," he said. Business continuity and disaster recovery also plays a role and should be cleverly worked in to maximise availability in the final mix without neglecting the cooling system, or even the role of UPS - because those devices protect against sags and surges as well as power cuts.

However, Godsall said link aggregation and bandwidth expansion played a much smaller role in the network performance of large customers, given the improved broadband delivery across Australian metropolitan areas lately.

Resellers should target better visibility of the network, then apply the right solutions. A managed service provider was obviously in one of the strongest positions to do this, Godsall said.

Lan 1 technical director, John Hamill, said SSL VPN was proving popular for customers who wanted to boost network performance, because it let remote users log onto their office network simply using their Web browser.

Mobile broadband cards, such as Telstra NextG, 3 Mobile or Vodafone, were top add-ons to bundle into packages for clients with different branches or numbers of mobile workers, he said.

Lan 1 hasn't yet seen a big move towards WAN optimisation, though. "We're not getting a lot of requests for that from our resellers. Most people are just looking at bandwidth as a solution now you can get an ADSL2+ connection," Hamill said.

Traffic-shaping products, conversely, are attracting a lot of interest and making waves in Lan 1's channel. Fortinet and SonicWall appliances for secure VPN and content management, including firewall and antivirus in the one box, were moving well, Hamill said.

Other providers are maximising availability by getting more applications online, using XML and file transfer to create e-business portals in a Web 2.0 way for things like managing orders and con notes.

Hamill said it was hard to single out any particular tool or approach to maximising network performance. There are too many variables to consider in almost every case - and so many possible solutions. Yet customers increasingly want the latest and greatest resource-hungry networked applications and environments - wireless, peer-to-peer applications, e-commerce, VoIP, video and more. And the onus was on the reseller to promote a multi-faceted overall solution that wouldn't break the network, he said.