The application landscape of today’s enterprise space is changing. A proliferation of mobile devices, BYOD initiatives, voice, video, and rich media content at the branch locations adds to the already constrained WAN bandwidth. Now along with delivering the typical enterprise applications, such as email, file, and web access, the network also has to deliver new rich media content, which puts extra strain on the WAN. Cisco WAAS and Akamai Connect are Cisco’s WAN optimization and application acceleration solution, a key pillar of the Cisco Intelligent WAN (Cisco IWAN) architecture. Cisco WAAS and Akamai Connect optimizes web and mobile applications by extending the Akamai Intelligent Platform directly into the branch enhancing the way your users access applications.
Recently, Miercom did an independent evaluation of Cisco WAAS with Akamai Connect and comparable WAN-optimization product, Steelhead, enabled with Web Proxy from Riverbed Technology. Cisco is proud to announce that the Cisco solution is now ‘Miercom Performance Verified’. Key findings from the report showcase Cisco’s superior acceleration capabilities including:
Clearly, Cisco WAAS and Akamai Connect comes out on top in the WAN optimization space. With Akamai Connect, we extend Akamai’s intelligent caching to the branch office where most businesses face severe bandwidth constraints and poor end user experience. This is represented in Miercom’s report. Riverbed’s Web Proxy feature also falls short of Cisco solution in terms of HTTP traffic optimization and feature robustness. One of the use cases where Cisco did exceptionally well is Apple OSx download. Riverbed’s Web Proxy cannot cache files greater than 2Gb in size (see graph below).
This graph shows that Cisco was able to reduce the amount of time it takes to download the Apple OSx by 97%, whereas Riverbed was not able to optimize the file download at all. Cisco solution empowers the customers to provide real benefits of HTTP caching without the constraint of file size. This gives customers the flexibility and peace of mind that their networks will not get choked when Apple releases a new update.
Read the full Miercom report here
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