 - Manage your network according to business need
- The alternative to WAN bandwidth upgrade
- Guaranteed performance all of the time
Evolution of the Network
With most businesses sourcing customers from almost every part of the world, and the trend for the workforce to increasingly locate away from the main corporate office, we are fortunate to have networks to keep it all connected. In fact, the network is the critical piece enabling your remote customers to do business with you and enabling your remote associates to work as one united company. These Wide Area Network (WAN) connections enable the global business, and the flexibility of network connections means that we can optimally locate our resources in the most strategic locations. The end result, our business efficiency and productivity are no longer constrained by geography.
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Make Due With Less
While the WAN supports the business by enabling remote workforces to function as one, it simultaneously works against the business's bottom line, being notoriously expensive and offering much less bandwidth. Whereas the Local Area Networks (LAN) have bandwidth to spare (at least 100 MB, and often 1 GB), the WAN may have as little as 128 KB. The same thinking that went into connecting local users will not work as you connect your remote users. With less bandwidth, and the high cost of increasing that bandwidth, the business is forced to run applications in a constrained environment. The business is run with less bandwidth.
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Unfortunately, the applications that are critical to business do not always get the priority they deserve on the WAN. For instance, the quality of a voice call, which only requires a little bandwidth, is compromised if a large file is downloaded through the same network in the middle of the call. The voice traffic, to most of the network infrastructure, appears just like any other traffic, and is handled with the same priority as any other network traffic. The reality is that all network traffic is not equally important to the business, and the characteristic needs of each traffic type varies. However, in a WAN environment where all traffic appears the same, all traffic is treated the same, and business critical applications will suffer in these bandwidth constricted environments.
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Taking Control of the WAN
The odds are against network applications as they start to hit the WAN bottleneck - the place where the high bandwidth LAN meets the low bandwidth WAN. This is the critical point where action must be taken to ensure business applications will perform well for remote users. This is the place to align the needs of the business with the flows of the network. This is the place where Expand's WAN Optimization technology will protect business critical traffic, while at the same time dramatically increasing usable WAN capacity. This is the place where the Expand solution will enable business to efficiently serve a productive remote user base over the WAN.
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Compression and QoS
When it comes to optimizing the WAN, there are two obstacles to overcome. The first is the WAN link's limited bandwidth. As the pioneer in WAN compression, Expand understands the delicate balance between analyzing traffic for compression and causing queuing and latency by interrupting the flows. The Expand compression technology focuses on performance, using low latency, lossless techniques that work on all applications and consistently deliver average bandwidth increases between 100% and 400%, with peaks over 1,000%. The second obstacle is aligning the network to the business at the LAN-WAN bottleneck. Expand's QoS is easy to set up and immediately ensures that the applications running the business are running unimpeded on the WAN. It is not just prioritization, but includes sophistication to combat congestion, mark packets for downstream QoS handling (i.e., MPLS), and rate control shaping to make sure flows get the bandwidth they need. With both compression and QoS, Expand's WAN Optimization will turn an expensive and low-bandwidth WAN into a strategic asset that will perform better, deliver more, and ensure business priorities are met.
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