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When WANs Aren't Wide Enough (continued)

connections by simply adding more pipes, or bandwidth. But increasingly, IT centers are looking toward more sophisticated options, because there will always be demand for additional bandwidth.

"I'm very bullish on the whole network and application optimization space," Metzler says. "There's a variety of products and solutions out there to make the WAN perform better. Or make the applications that run over the WAN perform better."

The two most common techniques for sending less information over the network are:

• Compression: squeezing the data being transferred to compact size before being sent, then expanding the transmission back to native format at the destination.
• Differencing: a method by which files that are being sent from one part of the network to another are compared, and only the differences in the files are transmitted. For example, a large database that is updated in India and then sent to the U.S. at the end of the Indian workday isn't transmitted in full -- only the parts of the database that have been updated are sent. The savings in bandwidth are significant.

These solutions are usually deployed via dedicated performance appliances offered by companies such as Cisco Systems, Juniper Solutions and Riverbed Technology.

Critical Data Gets Priority
Another smart investment, Hamilton and Metzler agree, is QoS software. QoS, or Quality of Service, enables network administrators to "see" into the network traffic, to identify what types of data are going where and control what gets network priority. (article continues)

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