one of my major projects during the last months was an evaluation of WAN acceleration technology, the selection of an solution and of course the global deployment of the solution. Based on our evaluation we decided to go with Cisco WAAS as solution. The initial deployment includes about 13 WAE appliances, some of it running as standalone units in regional offices and some of it running as cluster at our production sides and remote data centers.
This project is now almost done. During the last weeks I successfully move from Cisco demo equipment to our final equipment. 13 WAE devices got deployed worldwide at several locations in Germany, US, UK and Singapore. The integration of Cisco WAE into an Cisco wide area network is really easy. using WCCP for traffic redirection adds another option to seamless and smooth integration without any downtime.
The whole WAE network is controlled via an central management solution (Cisco Central Manager for WAAS), which makes the daily operation and monitoring quit easy.
Issues during the deployment? To be honest: there was only one issue with the central management appliances during the account setup for our network admins and finally it turned out it is not an problem of the device or software, it was a problem caused by incorrect administration. Cisco TAC found this out within less than 24 hours and so we were able to fix it quickly.
Our users already reported dramatic performance improvements, especially the application and design folks are now able to mirror there data around the globe much faster. you might raise the question whether we will save bandwidth and reduce cost; well this will not happen. Using WAN acceleration globally the users are able now to fill up high bandwidth MPLS links up to the line/port speed even on intercontinental links with latencies of more than 150ms. If I’m talking about high bandwidth MPLS links than we speak about >=50Mbps. our users are surprised to see download speeds from US or EMEA to SGP with 70-80Mbps. This rocks…
Whats left over?
within the next month I will still continue to optimize traffic, which is basically just an job of defining traffic patterns/port ranges at the central manager and get it accelerated the right way. Besides this the WAAS network does not require much maintenance at all. If it runs, it runs.
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