cisco WAAS process

[ajay kondapalli]

Iam little confused with Cisco Wide Area Application Engine .  (WAAS)

Does it retain only TCP header info in its Cache and speedup the application performance. How does it work?

Does it handle limited number of applications ? What kind of applications it can speedup on performance aspect?

Do all corporate networks use WAAS ?

Thanks,

Ajay 

[Fabrizio Pedracini]

Hi Ajay,

WAAS optimizes TCP traffic by breaking down the connection in 3 parts:
client-> EdgeWAAS
EdgeWAAS -> CoreWAAS
CoreWAAS-> Server
It does L4 TCP connection optimization, LZ compression and DRE caching. On the top of that it runs also specific application optimizers that are basically able to understand some upper layer protocols' messages and perform specific acceleration (CIFS / SSL / HTTP …). The different layers of optimization can be turned on and off on a per flow basis.
You can have a look at the design guide which gives you an overview on the technology:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/WAASDC11.html

hope this helps,
Fabrizio