Advances in today’s virtual technologies have made deciding between the two form factors more difficult. When virtual WOCs (vWOCs) first entered the market, the technology accelerated data more slowly than their physical counterparts—but that’s beginning to change.

The decision between hardware and software WAN optimizers has become less of a question about speed, and more of a tradeoff between scalability and throughput. It also becomes a question of how familiar IT professionals are with virtual technology. If someone isn’t familiar with a virtual machine or server, then a software WOC could be more trouble than it’s worth.

Nemertes principal analyst John Burke breaks down the hardware vs. software debate this way: 

IT needs to balance throughput requirements against scalability, infrastructure availability, and your desire to neatly modularize network functions. Where IT would have to deploy virtual machine hosts in places it did not otherwise plan to, a virtual WAN optimization appliance is not recommended. Where capacity is available and IT wants to spread WAN optimization widely, virtualization has more to recommend it.

To learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of hardware and software WAN optimizers, read Burke’s article on SearchEnterpriseWAN.com.

But times have changed: Software as a Service (SaaS) makes more sense for organizations; data and storage live in the cloud instead of on-premises; end users don’t just access corporate resources at an office, but also at home and on the go. These changes break down the traditional hub-and-spoke network architecture that once supported older business models. Today, making that data run faster for the cloud and mobile worker is nearly impossible with a hardware WOC or ADC.

Fortunately, vendors have caught on and developed virtual or cloud optimization solutions to keep up with this evolution. Yet cloud WAN optimization is not factored into WAN optimization market research reports, which paint a picture of a fading market. While WAN optimization may be called a different name — like “cloud optimization” or “IT performance solution”  – the technology will be there to accelerate any data traversing the network.  So when looking for a solution that can accelerate your data — wherever it may live — be on the look-out for non-traditional technology.

If the influx of mobile devices has proven anything, it’s that application delivery and Web content optimization go hand-in-hand. Tablets and smartphones are on the rise, and users need mobility. Traditional application delivery vendors are bracing for the future by aligning their products with the changing needs of the enterprise — faster, and more flexible Web experiences.

Riverbed has announced updates to its Stingray application delivery controller (ADC) product line adding its newly-acquired Aptimizer Web content optimization product to the ADC — Stingray version 9.0.

The announcement comes in at the heels of F5′s latest updates to its BIG-IP Application Delivery Controller (ADC) product line — which was enhanced to support Google’s SPDY protocol and designed with remote and mobile users in mind.

High latency for Web-based applications and slow-to-load websites are the enemy to any business, and the release of Stingray 9.0 sought to extend IT performance in the user direction, noted Naveen Prabhu, senior product manager for Riverbed.

“After just seven seconds, users will leave the Web site if it hasn’t loaded, and these users leaving are affecting your bottom line,” he said.

Cutting down the number of round trips to the server in order for Web pages to load is key for Web content optimization — and in gaining more page views. Stingray 9.0 enhanced with Aptimizer can optimize Web content up to four times faster, while eating up 40-60% less bandwidth,  Prabhu claimed, noting that one unnamed corporate website gained 10 more page views per day after deploying Stingray 9.0.

Depending on the enterprises’ environment, the latest version of Stingray — a software-based ADC — can be deployed standard server hardware on Cloud Steelhead to optimize any Web or cloud-based applications for the customer or cloud provider.

ADC vendors are starting to notice that while the legacy ADC model is important for bandwidth optimization, the user’s web experience must come first.

“Users don’t want to be sitting in Starbucks waiting for Web pages to load,” Prabhu said.

The PilotHouse Awards consist of ratings from 2,000 IT leaders, like yourselves, on vendor products in 22 technology areas. The application delivery optimization (ADO) market, consisting of vendors that produce WAN optimization products and application delivery controllers or both, turned out seven finalists and two winners:

• Cisco won the market leader category (a small group of highly-visibile vendors that take up a large market percentage) with a 4.19 overall rating.
• Juniper won the market challenger category (a large group of vendors that take up a smaller market percentage) with a 3.93 overall rating.

The overall results actually surprise me:

Enlarge ADO results.

Given Cisco’s recent bad press, I would have expected one of Cisco’s competitors to win in the application delivery and optimization category. Cisco has made no noise around its WAAS product line this year. (The company’s last announcement in the optimization space was in June of 2010 when the company upgraded its WAAS to 4.2.) It should come as good news for Cisco to receive one of the highest customer service, technology and value ratings from IT professionals this year.

Likewise, Juniper is not a name I hear much of from analysts and enterprise users in the WAN optimization and acceleration market. However, in September of 2010, the company’s SRX Series Services Gateways were selected by Verizon Business for its global Managed WAN Services portfolio — a feat which must have surely put Juniper on the map this year, since Verizon Business was selected as the market leader winner of the 2011 MPLS vendor category.

Both Cisco and Juniper beat out last year’s winners: Blue Coat and F5. Yet a direct comparison between 2011 and 2010 Nemertes PilotHouse Award results may not deliver an apples-to-apples comparison for the application delivery optimization category (ADO). This is because the ADO category did not exist until this year.

Why did the WAN optimization category morph into the ADO category in 2011? The reason, Nemertes Research analyst John Burke says, is this:

We see increasing consolidation in the market. Some of the big vendors, such as Cisco, Citrix, and F5 already had both WAN optimization and application delivery controller (ADC) solutions. Vendors plying one main branch of function, say, WAN optimization, continue to buy up other vendors so they can also offer the other main branch … [using] ADC. Witness Riverbed’s recent acquisition of Zeus and Aptimize.

We also expect not just the vendors but also the functions to continue to converge, onto multi-function appliances. So, we decided to focus the award on the goal — using the network to speed up application delivery to end users, the essence of ADO — rather than on any single specific ADO sub-strategy, such as WAN optimization.

Distance isn’t the only factor slowing down the WAN; the ongoing migration to Web-based applications, cloud computing and mobility hurt WAN application performance. Since slow applications slow business processes, company executives will notice the difference, and app delivery will suddenly become a top of mind issue for WAN managers.

Part of achieving acceptable application delivery is to think higher up the OSI model. Mark Fabbi, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Inc., explains that “throwing more resources and throwing more money at Layer 2 and Layer 3 doesn’t make much difference [to applications].”

IT network professionals who traditionally work at the bottom of the OSI model may be uncomfortable dealing with the application layer. However, if you’re used to configuring WAN optimization controllers, you may be back in familiar territory.

Industry expert Jim Metzler explains that WAN optimization controllers can fix application delivery — just as they would optimize other traffic across the WAN. Well, maybe not exactly the same way. Metzler’s application delivery 2.0 guide highlights how to use WAN optimization controllers to optimize particular applications. You can use them to do the following:

• Optimize virtualized applications.
• Improve application traffic in the cloud.
• Enable mobile application delivery.
• Support dynamic virtual machine movement.

There’s no reason all the application delivery work should rest on you though. Network pros can talk to application development teams to make application traffic svelte to start. If it’s too late for that, then talking to your carrier about application SLAs and agile QoS may be another option.

In the video below, Jim summarizes the hour-long discussion. Bottom line, Jim said vendors agreed that virtual appliances cost about one-third of their physical appliance counterparts, and are often available in a pay-as-you-go model.

The conversation also focused on the need to support multiple hypervisors, not just VMware. This was based on an impromptu survey of session attendees. Nearly all of them said they are using VMware in their infrastructure today, but almost none of them think they will be using exclusively VMware in the future. Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen will find their way into the enterprise, and virtual WOCs and ADCs will have to adapt to this.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/SQycyoUDkvM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Beyond what Jim said, one other thing I heard: Many of the vendors offer both hardware-based and virtual ADCs and WOCs. Vendors like Citrix and F5 believe that enterprises will continue to deploy a combination of virtual and physical appliances over time. They will deploy them in a two-tiered architecture. In places where sheer performance is the priority, enterprises will use hardware-based products, but in places where features and functionality are the priority and performance isn’t a major concern, enterprises will deploy virtual appliances.

As i reported in the past, collaboration between development teams and network engineers early on can save you from a lot of headaches later.

So, WAN engineers, do what you can to help the development teams understand how their apps will behave in your production network. You can insist they buy some WAN emulators, for instance.

Also, it’s worth showing them what will happen when the application is running through a Layer 4 through 7 network.  F5 Networks, for instance, just released a virtual version of its application delivery controller BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). LTM Virtual Edition (VE) is available in a free trial version right now. Network engineers and app developers alike can download LTM VE, whether for evaluation, or simply to test how new apps will work in a production application delivery controller environment. It will certainly allow you to avoid any nasty surprises.

This free version has a throughput limit of a 1mbps, so it’s really only useful for evaluation and testing, but F5 is planning to release an LTM VE version with production-class throughput rates later this year. This version  will be ideal for cloud computing and virtualized environments. F5 customers will be able to use LTM VE in concert with physical LTM appliances, allowing for quick deployment of new ADCs without having to buy and set up a new hardware appliance. A customer quote from a recent press release explains the utility of the eventual production version of LTM VE. Mandar Ghosalkar, applications infrastructure manager at Byer California, said:

F5′s virtual BIG-IP LTM fits well with Byer’s IT strategy for several reasons. First, this will enable us to test new solutions in an isolated environment and then easily transfer them to our production BIG-IP devices. Second, it should save valuable time and resources by eliminating the need to purchase and rack additional devices, helping us deploy applications faster.

F5 envisions scenarios where the LTM VE can be deployed to manage application delivery within both private and public clouds, working in concert with physical LTM appliances that are already in place to manage the traditional Layer 4-7 networking that goes on in data centers.