WAN Compression Devices

[jacquesd]

Hi all,

A while back I started looking at these devices and since then we did POCs on

1) Expand

2) Peribit (now Juniper)

3) Steelhead

4) Orbital

We also requested a POC for Cisco WAAS, but we have not gotten to it yet.

The results of all these tests were that we can generally half the bandwidth requirements of all the WAN links. We are running on a SP MPLS VPN backbone.

The results look great, but recently I started having questions how this will limit us in the future. Some of them are:

1) Reduction tunnels - good or bad?

2) Some devices simply 'broke' certain applications

3) IPv6 support - addressing and encryption

4) Future OS support. If future OSs are going to start encrypting data or not.

Can anyone that has good or bad experiences with these devices please give some comments (or anyone that has opinions about this technology)?

Thanks!

Jacques

[royalblues]

Hi Jack,

Most of these devices run a proprietory tunnel to optimize the TCP transmission across WAN.

Because of this the Header information gets hidden which sometimes breaks features like NAT etc.

Cisco WAAS does not alter the header information and hence i think would not pose any problems.

Still i would suggest to have a POC done and analyse the results

HTH, rate if it does

Narayan

[jacquesd]

Hi Narayan,

Yes my biggest issue is that tunnels hide statistical info from the SP reports. It also breaks QoS in the backbone, although some of them now marks the tunnel (outer, if you will) packets. In this case QoS can only be done based on DSCP, not anything else (unless you mark it before entering the device - this will be an additional cost since not all the remote sites have switches capable of doing this).

The only ones that do not use tunnels are WAAS and Orbital. Orbital was the one that broke one of our Avaya IP telephony apps, but only under certain conditions. It just seems to me that it adds too much complexity into the network.

Jacques