Is WAAS 5 that much better than previous versions?

[kenny.kerns]

I have never used Cisco WAAS for wan op (I've used BlueCoat and Silverpeak) and have heard less than complimentary comments on its ease of deployment and overall functionality. I am currently looking to replace my aging Bluecoat environment and am curious about people's opinion of 5.X.

From what I have heard it is night and day different and an overall much better better product.

What are the communities opinions? How does it stack up agianst Riverbed and the other players?

[chbock]

Hi Kenny,

you are asking for community opinion. Working for Cisco I can give you my perspective, I hope that counts as well ;-)

You are right about the day and night difference.

One of the reasons is the completely reworked Central Manager GUI, which is using HTML 5 now. So it can be used on iPads or similar as well. But more important is the Look and Feel and usability of version 5, which is perceived very positive from what I take away in my conversations with customers.

Perhaps the biggest addition to the portfolio is a new redirection technology, AppNav (Application Navigation).

With AppNav you can now do loadbalancing and traffic distribution to a WAAS (WAE/WAVE) cluster more easily and in fine granularity. This means, you can distribute certain networks (Branches) or applications to a certain set of WAAS appliances at ease.

What think needs to be mentioned are Cisco's partnerships with leading IT companies in order to jointly work on Application Optimizers and haveing them certified. Best example, if we are talking about the new version (so true for 4.5 as well) is The Citrix ready certification for ICA optimization.

Others inlcude e.g SAP NetWaver, and Microsoft Protocols ( CIFS/SMB /native v2, (e)MAPI, Video Streaming Server, virtual Windows Appliance on WAAS), ...

Other Highlights:

WAAS Express Version 2. You can run WAAS on your Router as an IOS Feature.

SSL scalabilty at 75.000 concurrent sessions on WAVE 8541.

Cloud solution with vWAAS (virtual WAAS).

Hope that give a first impression,

chris

[kenny.kerns]

Thanks for the response, Christian. That all pretty much echoes what I have heard about WAAS, from both my sales rep and colleagues in the industry.

I'm mostly interested to hear from people that have migrated to 5.x from lower versions, or that have replaced their existing WANOp environment with 5.x and their experience in doing so.

[nuverafuelcells]

Kenny,

  I can't really comment on the differences between 4.x and 5.x since I installed 5.x with a new deployment back in July.  I also used Bluecoat in the past as well as Riverbed.  In my case, I am using SRE modules and WAAS Express.  The documentation as it relates to the SRE modules is not great and took some time to figure out how to deploy...starting from zero with no training...I was successful.

  I am running WAAS with all the Cisco defaults and have been very pleased with the results.  The central manager GUI is intuitive and easy to use.  It shows you stats on how well the optimization is working.  It allows you to change, centrally, most all options as they relate to WAAS.  My management loves the weekly PDF report that the CM generates...even if it is just fluff.

  As compared to Bluecoat...I think it is just as easy (if not easier), and the results with WO are similar.  In the case of Riverbed...I think Riverbed was a bit easier to setup, but far more costly.

  Issues...my only real issue has been with WAAS Express.  I bought a 2901 bundled unit.  WAAS Express works, but is unstable when using the new 2.0 cifs-express feature.  With that option disabled, it runs great.  From what I am reading...cifs-express is new code and 2.0 is new as well.  Given some time this will work itslef out.  Without the feature, CIFS is still accelerated quite well....I believe the only impact is that with cifs-express there is some RAM based file caching.

  I would have no reservations recommending WAAS at this point.  It is quite usable from a management point of view and the actual wan optimization is quite good.

-Andy