AcceleNet's Application Accelerator and WAN Optimizer Technologies
In order to solve a problem, you need to understand it – really understand it. Imagine receiving a large email attachment that you need to review, modify and send back to the author (perhaps through several iterations). It’s easy on the LAN or from a remote office using an acceleration appliance. But what if you’re at the airport with a few minutes before boarding? With WiFi or EVDO, you wouldn’t even bother trying. But wouldn’t it be great to grab it just before boarding, review and revise it on your flight, then send it back during your next layover? With AcceleNet you can.
What’s so challenging about applying WAN optimization and application acceleration to small office, home office and mobile users? For one thing, although the market is flooded with acceleration appliances, these devices don’t work for extended network applications because they:
- are costly
- require remote support staff
- depend heavily on cached content from multiple users to gain significant compression ratios
- use TCP, which is inefficient on noisy, bandwidth-constrained networks
You need a software-only solution that overcomes the inherent problems in last-mile networks and is optimized for single- and few-user environments. AcceleNet employs a unique combination of technologies designed specifically for remote and mobile use:
Data Compressors
AcceleNet is uniquely designed to deliver large amounts of data over narrowband networks. Patented compression engines exploit advance knowledge of standard file formats to decompose and analyze files on-the-fly, determining and applying the best algorithm, or sequence of algorithms, for optimal compression. The result is the highest compression ratios possible on first (“cold cache”) download.
Cold-cache compression is one of the most critical contributors to cost savings and user satisfaction in single and few user environments. Solutions for large offices rely on cached content to accelerate performance for many users, but if you’re the only one working from your location, you need speed the first time – and every time. AcceleNet maintains data history on both the client system and the AcceleNet server that recognizes and sends only the changed content each time a file is transferred, minimizing bandwidth consumption and improving performance even further. The bandwidth savings alone can justify the investment for small offices or where wireless subscriber services are based on usage.
Application Accelerators
In addition to AcceleNet’s patented compression techniques and transport optimizers, the software recognizes that the protocols used by many enterprise applications were designed for the LAN and are extremely “chatty” in their use of the network – that is, the protocol uses tens, even hundreds, of bi-directional handshakes, each transferring very small amounts of data to transfer an entire file. One of the worst offenders is one of the most frequent activities – accessing corporate file servers using Microsoft’s Common Interface File System (CIFS). CIFS file shares and other chatty applications are prone to enormous delays over high-latency links because the latency is multiplied by each trip.
AcceleNet achieves the highest possible performance by using the minimum possible number of roundtrips and the highest possible compression for more enterprise applications than any other system:
- FTP and CIFS acceleration: AcceleNet caches files and directory information on the client and is pro-actively notified by the server of updates
- HTTP acceleration: the industry’s only accelerator to retrieve all web page objects in a single request
- HTTPS acceleration: the industry’s only accelerator that optimizes this previously uncompressible format without any loss of security or data integrity
- Email acceleration: no reconfiguration is needed for either the server or client
- CRM/ERP applications: compression and acceleration are both applied to chatty web-based ERP/CRM applications
WAN Optimizers
Perhaps the greatest advantage AcceleNet brings to remote and mobile acceleration is the recognition of TCP’s inefficiencies with broadband, wireless, satellite, and dial-up networks.
AcceleNet uses the industry’s only proprietary transport protocol that adapts efficiently and automatically to the timing variations of packet switched wireless networks, the latency of broadband satellite links, and noisy WiFi or DSL connections. It delivers the highest possible performance even in the most extreme network conditions. The graph below shows that AcceleNet provides 11x faster throughput over native TCP and competitive solutions when encountering 10% packet loss. In fact, the benefits increase as network conditions degrade – the result is significantly better application response time.
(Click to enlarge)
AcceleNet alone supports the difficult demands of the many types of access networks used by today’s enterprise users.
Network and User Transparency
Competitive systems simply do not come close to AcceleNet’s configuration advantages and ease of deployment; the technical superiority of AcceleNet’s compression engines, application accelerators, and transport optimizers are further enhanced by a network-friendly architecture that minimizes the total cost of ownership:
- No content server reconfiguration: no modifications to application or file servers
- No network resource changes: no modifications to routers, switches, or other network devices
- Out of the critical path: IP network topologies are unaffected and, in the event of a server failure, the only impact is the loss of optimization; in contrast, WAN optimizing gateways that sit on the critical path can result in network outages for the remote users
- No reconfiguration of client applications: data is redirected transparently; no changes are required to any client-side applications
- Preservation of desktop security: no requirement to open incoming ports on client firewall or other local security software
- User transparency: client software requires no user maintenance or local configuration changes and does not modify the appearance of any application
- Auto-detection of high-speed networks: automatically transitions to an office network when reconnecting to the LAN