Many enterprises believe that the key is WAN acceleration. But optimizing the network - via compression, QoS, or TCP acceleration - is only one part of the solution needed to truly improve application performance across the network.

Unlike other approaches to WAN acceleration, Riverbed's wide-area data services (WDS) solutions can provide dramatic WAN performance increases - typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times faster - across the broad range of WANs that enterprises care about the most.

With RiOS even SSL-encrypted (e.g. HTTPS) traffic can take advantage of Riverbed's award-winning acceleration techniques. These dramatic performance increases enable customers to dramatically change the way they do business: Inter-office collaboration becomes easier; broad-based IT consolidation becomes a reality; network-based backups become feasible; data can be more easily secured through centralization.

The Challenge of Enterprise WAN Acceleration

Enterprises today depend on a wide variety of WANs to make their organizations function effectively. After all, how many organizations run solely on file sharing or email? Any effective solution for WAN acceleration must provide significant acceleration for all key WANs that cross the WAN.

Most WAN acceleration approaches look at the performance problem from just one angle - the network. But the network is only one of the factors slowing WAN performance. Because of the limited approach taken by many WAN acceleration vendors, enterprises that deploy these products typically see just 10 to 20 percent improvement in WAN performance, and similarly small gains in bandwidth utilization. In the case of QoS-only products, enterprises see no acceleration overall, they merely make trade-offs between reserving bandwidth for one WAN at the expense of another.

To make the WAN performance leap that enterprises need, a radically different approach must be taken: Simultaneously address bandwidth constraints, TCP's behavior in high latency networks, and inefficiencies in the applications themselves.