Silver Peak is touting the Virtual WAN optimization Marketplace—announced in late February—as a “self-service” store featuring the entirety of Silver Peak’s virtual WAN optimization appliance portfolio. Network engineers can go there to find use cases for products, watch videos on how to deploy them, download the software and get instant access to license keys. From this new store engineers can access and deploy these products anywhere in their network and across all common hypervisors.

Considering the nearly 8,000 free downloads the recently-released Silver Peak VX-X virtual WAN optimizer has received over the past six months, Rick Tinsley, president and CEO of Silver Peak may have been onto something when he said that the industry was ready for virtual WAN optimization, although it may have taken Silver Peak time to get used to the idea. As the needs and infrastructure of the enterprise change, virtualization is becoming more appealing to networking pros, especially in light of the potential cost saving opportunities that virtualization can provide.

In keeping with the idea of providing adapted WAN optimization offerings to users, Silver Peak believes that changing how these services are delivered and how users can acquire WAN optimization is just as important. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if other vendors look into user feedback to facilitate how they too can change up how they package and deliver WAN optimization and virtual WAN optimization to potential customers.

The wide area network (WAN) as we know it is changing, and it’s thanks to the growth of video, big data, mobility and consumerization of IT. As these bandwidth-hogging trends make an impact on corporate WANs, IT is seriously considering the Internet for WAN connectivity. Broadband Internet is where bandwidth is less limited; it’s the most logical connection for cloud computing and SaaS; and it’s more flexible to boot.

To keep up with the evolving workforce, the WAN must be redefined. The new WAN will no longer be made of permanent virtual circuit (PVC)-type connections, like frame relay, which must be reprogrammed and configured with every change. The private WAN as we know it will be replaced by Internet traffic or IP. It will be the only transport flexible enough to keep pace with changing network traffic patterns — which no longer travel soley in the private WAN between branch offices and the data center; traffic will travel between branches and mobile workers, cloud networks and data centers.

“When the majority of our employees were in company locations and didn’t move, those older WAN technologies were fine. Now that we have highly mobile workers, IP is the protocol that fits the workforce best, and IP moreso than the Internet, [because] IP is highly dynamic, flexible and resillient. With Internet and IP technologies, you don’t need to do any reprogramming; it just knows where to go,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research.

And while trading out a leased line for an Internet VPN is more the exception than the norm, enterprises are certainly trending that way for WAN connectivity.

Adding WAN optimization techniques (like protocol acceleration, compression, object and byte caching and QoS) to Blue Coat’s security-as-a-service format gives enterprises a chance to connect branch offices directly to the Internet rather than backhaul Web traffic to and from the data center. By eliminating two of the problems associated with Internet connectivity — security and slowness — Blue Coat is confident that enterprises will be less anxious about connecting business-critical applications to the Internet.

“BlueCoat is helping to … remove the fundamental fear factor associated with opening branch office access to the Internet, thereby enabling faster cloud applications, lower cost networking and more direct access to cloud applications,” said Mark Urban, Blue Coat’s Senior Director of Product Marketing.

Enterprises who do have Internet connectivity between branch offices and corporate data centers need to protect corporate data via a VPN. However, doing this would take away the advantage of direct Internet access for cloud applications and for access of employees to the greater Internet, Urban explained.

“It’s not only removing the security concerns with our cloud security service but also improving the performance of those applications over the Internet,” he said.

According to Blue Coat, the MACH5 can accelerate file access and backup up to 300 times and eliminate bandwidth consumption by as much as 90%. The security-as-a-service uses the same capabilities delivered on its secure gateway appliances tied into it’s WebPulse service and allows companies to pay based on a subscription tailored to your companies needs.

In the race of vendors aiming to improve SaaS performance with cloud WAN optimization, it seems Blue Coat Systems is running neck-and-neck with vendors like Riverbed Technology (in association with Akamai) and Aryaka.

Briefly, when we say “network virtualization,” we mean combining network resources, like bandwidth, into a virtual unit that can then be allocated (or unallocated) to various network processes. If you explore the definition on WhatIs.com it says:

Network virtualization is intended to optimize network speed, reliability, flexibility, scalability, and security. Network virtualization is said to be especially effective in networks that experience sudden, large, and unforeseen surges in usage.

It should therefore come as no surprise how useful network virtualization can be across a WAN. It can be used, for example, to simplify WAN management.

In this podcast with Network Virtualization book co-author Victor Moreno, we begin to understand how to deploy and maintain WAN virtualization. We covered our bases on SearchEnterpriseWAN.com by consulting the other author, Kumar Reddy, on what IT professionals need to know about extending virtual networks over WANs.

While we can’t all learn to support multiple virtual networks across WANs overnight, we can gradually understand how to apply network virtualization to make IT tasks easier and less repetitive. Take it from Moreno and Reddy!

Joining the virtual WAN optimization appliance roundup is WAN optimization vendor Ipanema Technologies. The vendor announced its “Cloud Ready Networks vision” consisting of new products and partnerships. What makes Ipanema’s solution unique in the industry is its claim to superior network visibility and WAN governance that can now be applied to cloud environments.

“We guarantee the performance of the applications you’re running in your anything-as-a-service environment across your wide area network,” says Ipanama Technologies Product Manager Mark Burton.

“[Because] we’re able to guarantee the performance, we’re then able to provide SLAs for these critical business applications—for the ERP, for the CRM—while still guaranteeing the performance of the applications that are in the Internet…which is a fairly unique offering that we feel we are uniquely positioned in the market to deliver,” he said.

Ipanema Technologies’ cloud-ready products include the following:

• Ipanema’s ANS 7.0 is the upgraded software that runs on top of its ip|engine products: Ipanema’s latest Autonomic Networking System (ANS) edition can identify specific SaaS traffic—like that of Google Apps, Office 365 and Salesforce—and differentiate this from normal Web traffic. The upgrade also improves on hybrid network unification allowing companies to use multiple network combinations like dual MPLS or service providers. ANS 7.0 is available today.
• Ipanema’s virtual ip|engine appliance: This is a software image that can be uploaded into an anything-as-a-service environment or into a private virtual data center. This removes the requirement for a hardware device to get Ipanama’s WAN governance, although it won’t be available until the end of this June.
• Two new hardware devices: A low-end ip|engine 20 delivers 20 Mbps bi-directional throughput and an even lower-end ip|engine nano-appliance does 8 Mbps. Both will launch in September.*

Burton explains the reasons for Ipanema’s move to the cloud: 

We’ve been talking about ‘WAN governance’ for a long time at Ipanema—getting full optimization and control over all your applications across your global network. WAN governance doesn’t change as an approach just because you move to the cloud. In fact, it becomes more important, because when you’ve got cloud-based applications, you still need to be able to discover, understand and communicate your clear key performance indicators to get the information about application performance. You must be able to control and dynamically optimize your public or private applications regardless of whether they’re flowing over the Internet or the traditional VPN.

The guaranteed performance, the application SLA associated with those applications doesn’t change, whether they’re hosted in a service provider’s data center, in Amazon’s EC2 or even your own corporate data center—you still need to be able to guarantee those application SLAs. And of course you need to take advantage of the cost benefit that comes from hybrid networks used in your traditional MPLS VPN and make better use of your Internet connectivity. The whole approach needs to encompass all of your users wherever they happen to be, to provide the flexibility and agility that the enterprise really requires in a dynamic business environment.

*Editor’s note: The devices launched in October and were renamed the nano|engine 2 and nano|engine 5. Read more about Ipanema Technologies nano|engine product line in this post.

On top of being asked to manage cloud services you had no control over, companies told WAN professionals to complete a great deal more: “I want you to make sure our file transfers are secure and compliant,” they said. “I want voice and video traffic sent to our most far-flung employees. I want you to make these applications work faster with less bandwidth on a non-existent budget. I also want you to migrate to IPv6 because we soon won’t reach our intended customer base. And while you’re at it, I want a pony.” Sound familiar? Well, you weren’t the only one.

While the year of 2010 was marked by a plethora of seemingly-impossible tasks, SearchEnterpriseWAN.com’s readers turned to good advice, technical tips, and noteworthy news to help them understand and manage WAN technologies from this year.  Read the best pieces of content that came out of 2010 in our top WAN news articles, our top 10 WAN feature stories, our most popular WAN questions, or revel in our top 10 tips in 2010 on wide area network technology.

Above all else, have a happy holiday and New Year!

Many vendors and analysts alike have agreed on one technology trend that’s here to stay: cloud computing. While the hype around cloud computing has been deafening over the last year or so, many industry experts agree that cloud hype has died away (which is not to say that the Gartner cloud hype cycle will die down). Instead, cloud deployments have taken the place of cloud buzz. Verticals that have caught the cloud deployment fever include the healthcare industry (as seen in this Help at Home case study) and the manufacturing industry (as illustrated in this private cloud computing case study from furniture manufacturer MasterBrand Cabinets).

Now that enterprises are seriously considering the cloud computing model, SearchEnterpriseWAN.com thought it time to feature a cloud computing tutorial for WAN managers. While it’s one thing to understand what cloud computing is, it’s another to understand what cloud means to the wide area network. Will you need to buy more bandwidth to support cloud computing? How do you know which networking tasks can be outsourced to cloud? These questions and more are answered in our comprehensive cloud tutorial. If you have any comments after reading it, send them to Editor@SearchEnterpriseWAN.com.

Of the WAN technology markets, several interesting observations came out of the webinar:

• Between MPLS and Ethernet, Ethernet scores consistently higher than MPLS in terms of reliability and technology.
• WAN optimization has become much more advanced and mature. Presenter Irwin Lazar said, “We’ve seen this technology explode in terms of technology.”
• Despite cloud security concerns around compliance, Security-as-a-Service (SaaS) was the highest rated of any other technology.
• Of all the categories scored, carriers received the lowest scores for customer service.

Down to specific WAN technologies, here were the results for the Nemertes 2010 PilotHouse Awards:

WAN optimization: Blue Coat Systems won in the market leader category (anyone considered to have a high amount of customers, shipments and revenue), while F5 won in the market challenger category (a less-established vendor in the market space). Riverbed fell off about 13% compared to last year, while Blue Coat improved 4%. Cisco actually improved its WAN technology but stayed flat in value. WAN vendors overall went up across the board and have improved in every area.

The top 5 vendor scores broke down as follows for the Nemertes 2010 PilotHouse Award WAN optimization category (5=excellent; 1=unacceptable):

MPLS technology: The top 5 vendors in the Nemertes 2010 PilotHouse Award MPLS category were these:

Ethernet technology: The Nemertes 2010 PilotHouse Award top 5 Ethernet providers were rated:

 The top 5 Security-as-a-Service (SaaS) carriers were:

The remaining cloud computing vendors that consisted of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastrucutre as a Service (IaaS) only had a 6% cloud adoption rate among survey participants, so no market leaders were awarded. However, IBM was the highest rated market challenger, mostly for its high customer service rating. IBM’s technology and value were all above 4.17 points, which left IBM with a 4.20 overall rating.

To hear the full results, you can register for the free webinar on Tuesday, September 21, 2010, 2:00-3:00 PM EDT: 2010 Benchmark: The Characteristics (and Technologies) of Highly Successful IT Organizations.

As Silver Peak Systems was gearing up to announce the release of their virtual WAN optimization appliance, I noticed that a few of their customer use cases shared an interesting quality — they illustrated unusual circumstances where virtual WAN optimization was not just a convenience or a cost-saver, but a necessity.

After having recently listened to Silver Peak’s marketing team talk up their virtual WAN op appliance, the VX Series, imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a Q&A with Silver Peak President and CEO Rick Tinsley that former site editor Tim Scannell had done in September 2009. He asked how Rick thought virtualization would affect WAN optimization.

You can view his full answer on the Q&A page, but since it’s long, here’s the (edited-down and emphasis-added) portion that caught my attention:

“Virtualization is interesting but has to be the most overused buzzword in the industry today. There is server virtualization, which everyone in the industry has had experience with, and the ROI is pretty straightforward. When you get into desktop virtualization, however, you’re going to find that your mileage will vary and that it will vary tremendously.

[...] In terms of virtualizing the network element, this is where the marketing people tend to get a little bit ahead of themselves. We went through this a couple of years ago when some of the vendors were talking about having server blades in their boxes. If you ask people who run networks, most do not want a Windows server on their router. When we went through our own internal server virtualization process, we found that some apps lend themselves very well to virtualization and that you can truly get better server utility and better ROI from these applications.

Virtualizing network elements – like routers and switches and WAN accelerators – is one of those things that makes for a good PowerPoint and good marketing, but I’m not sure where it’s going to go in terms of actual deployment.

I gave Rick a chance to explain what drove his very sudden about-face and how he might respond to criticism that this may be seen by some customers as a hasty (and thus potentially sloppy) attempt to catch up to competitors, who have been well-established here for some time.

Check out his response below the jump…

“We were concerned about how virtualization would impact our product strategy. You have to remember we’re a bit different from other [vendors] we compete with,” Tinsley told me, pointing to Silver Peak’s legacy as a high-performance data center vendor. “It’s not hard to achieve the same performance in a virtual incarnation as it is in a dedicated appliance, but on the high end, they can’t really be virtualized and this is true of any appliance.”

The move was driven by multiple customer requests and eventually lead to talks with VMware, Tinsley said.

“We were surprised when we started. We knew everyone uses virtual machines in their data center, but we weren’t sure how many customers use virtual infrastructure in their branch offices,” he said, adding that he found many large technology companies were using virtualization at the branch to save on shipping costs and configuration time. “It really is a pretty compelling [case].”

He noted that Silver Peak is still hesitant to develop a virtual WAN optimization appliance more powerful than 50 Mbps and will encourage customers to stick with its physical appliances (which range from 4 Mbps to 1 Gbps) at headquarters and data centers.

But what about quality? Silver Peak released its VX Series about 10 months after Tinsley made that statement to SearchEnterpriseWAN.com. I’m not a developer or engineer, but that seems like a short time to go through the whole process — from design to release. But Tinsley said that Silver Peak’s legacy of running on standard hardware meant that virtualizing the software was fairly straightforward.

“The reality is for products like ours — that run on Linux operating systems and standard server componentry — is it’s pretty simple to virtualize them,” he said. “It’s more about making sure you can deliver the same functionality and performance for a given model, and that’s why we limited the virtualization up to our 50-megabit [product], which frankly for us is on the lower end of performance…. It’s not like we had to write a new product or new code. It’s virtually the same code.”

• In this podcast interview, Zeus explains how cloud computing affects WAN bandwidth.
• In this article, we learn how WAN optimization improves cloud computing.
• These tips will improve WAN performance in cloud environments.