Best Practices for Application Acceleration
If you understand what technology can and cannot do for your network, there can be tremendous benefits from application acceleration. Gartner classifies application acceleration products as appliances that “enable server/data center consolidation and deployment of browser-based application interfaces while lowering total cost of ownership.” As application acceleration takes on many forms, there is no single definition for making an application go faster.
These are a few selected best practices for deploying application acceleration devices in enterprise networks.
* Identify which part of your network can benefit from application acceleration
The goals for users differ from user to user. For some it may reducing WAN bandwidth consumption and cutting monthly circuit costs be users, for others it may be speeding bulk data transfer, such as in backup, or for other it may be improving response times for interactive applications is most important. There are different types of acceleration devices that work in the data center. By identifying the bottlenecks in the network, you can decide which part of the network can benefit most from application acceleration.
* Does your application acceleration complement other enterprise initiatives?
With many organizations having server consolidation plans under way many are moving remote servers into centralized data centers. By giving remote users LAN-like performance, symmetrical WAN-link application acceleration devices can help by decreasing response time and WAN bandwidth usage. It is also important to consider whether application acceleration can complement other enterprise IT initiatives, as application acceleration can aid in enterprise VoIP or video rollouts by prioritizing key flows and keeping latency minimal.
* Deploy acceleration devices to enhance performance
Deploying products in “pass-through” mode is what many acceleration vendors recommend. Ideally enterprises deploy acceleration devices with the goal of improving performance of two to three key protocols when they only to learn that the network in fact carries five or six other sorts of traffic that would also have an advantage from acceleration.
* Consider the existing traffic patterns
Before enabling acceleration, it is vital to understand the standing existing traffic patterns. In measuring performance improvements from application acceleration, obtaining a baseline is mandatory.
* Decide between high performance and high availability
Network architects inevitably opt for better availability, when forced to choose between high availability and high performance or really high performance. As networks don’t go very fast when they’re down there are a lot of implications when deciding which acceleration device type to select.
* Acceleration without tunneling, is usually the best choice
Most vendors assert that tunneling is a security benefit as traffic can be authenticated, encrypted, and protected from alteration in flight. As encrypted traffic can’t be inspected, it could be a problem for any firewalls, bandwidth managers, QoS-enabled routers or other devices that sit between pairs of acceleration devices. Acceleration without tunneling is the way to go, if traffic transparency is the main issue.
A worthy addition to the network armory, application acceleration is a technology worth considering with the significant performance and cost benefits. When implemented effectively, it can not only cut down big bandwidth bills, but it can also improve application performance. Also, when looking for a solution for applications requiring a high-degree of secure connectivity, a good choice is Application Delivery Controllers which combines high-performance SSL acceleration with server load balancing and application acceleration to create a traffic ideal management solution.
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