Caching to WAN remote sites

[parrotbob]

Hello all:

Looking for some high level, kind of theoretical advice here...

Let's say I have a Network with a core LAN in the main office data center and a bunch of remote sites over a WAN which is largely made up of 10 and 100mb ethernet links.  Historically, the remote sites have hosted their own server(s) because bandwidth was at a premium and users would not tolerate unpredictable response times on their applications.  Suddenly, the edict comes down that all servers must be pulled in and centralized in the main office.  Concerns at the remote sites run rampant that heavily bandwidth-intensive activities, like pulling GIS images and data and very large CAD drawings from a remote location over the WAN is going to bog things down.

Is there a device that can cache particular types of application or file data, more than just the typical web cache engines that I have stumbled over in most of my research?  Some of the applications run by this organization are not very well written and they don't work all that fantastically over the local Network, let alone the WAN, but some things could end up being a problem as we put the "edict" into place and the servers back to the central office.  I'm thinking that if we could put in a small pizza-box device in a rack with some disk that could cache things like very large CAD drawings or frequently used imagery from central GIS servers we might be able to overcome some of the flack we're going to get from the anti-change agents who are going to have a fit when we move the servers to a central location where we can vrtualize and maintain them in a MUCH more economical way....

Any advice?

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

Some WAN caching appliances work very well and they will let you identify traffic to cache or not.  (They may provide cache effectiveness per traffic kind, so you can determine whether caching is suitable for different traffic types.)

Often biggest performance issue is the 1st time access; "normal" WAN latency.

You might want to carefully review QoS options too.  Doesn't make a big file download as fast as it would from a local server but does help preclude its download being adverse to any other "little stuff" while using WAN link concurrently.

[vik]

Do you know if the Application(s) are TCP or UDP based. You can look at Cisco WAAS appliances, WAAS on the SRE or UCS-E series modules or the router integrated WAASX solutions.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/modules/ps2797/ps9750/data_sheet_c78-605215.html

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/contnetw/ps5680/ps11211/datasheet_c78-611644.pdf