Introducting Network Application Optimization To Your Business
posted by matt @ 3:53 AM
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Network application optimization is the ability to deliver applications anywhere, at any time, effectively, in order to meet or exceed the business expectations.
Network application optimization is an assessment / consulting type of study. That assessment study is really focused on gathering where you are today:
- Gathering empirical data through traces or packet-capture;
- Gathering empirical data through analysis and modeling.
The above give you a clear view of how the network and the application look today, and balance that against your business strategy.
When looking at your business drivers you need to get to those two things coupled together. This way you will know where you are today and where you want to get to in the future and provide a transformation-type road map of how you are going to get there.
Network optimization itself could be a great number of things:
- It could be WAN acceleration optimization;
- It could be load balancing;
- It could be tuning your current network;
- It could be a replacing kit;
- It could be amending how your applications perform,
- It could be technology, which could be suitable to a solution.
Network application optimization brings all those things together with a concise set of recommendations.
Why is network application optimization important to businesses?
Network application optimization is critical to a business because of the business applications that run across the infrastructure.
Your network needs to be provisioned to support business-critical applications and the delivery of these applications in terms of:
- Reliability;
- Performance;
- Security.
Optimizing your network to support the delivery of your applications is absolutely essential.
A good example is if a business is transforming to a centralized environment - centralizing a client-computing environment, or centralizing data centers.
For example: A business may have multiple data centers across the UK, centralizing their data centers to one place. That starts to introduce bandwidth contention delivery issues such as performance latency, so optimizing your network to support that business change is absolutely critical.
Does network application optimization focus on everything that runs over the wide-area network?
Network application optimization is primarily focused on the wide-area coverage. It can have applications provisioned from a remote user to the centralized computing environment.
The wider-area network is just one part of the jigsaw, as you cannot just look at the WAN. You will also have to look at:
- The LAN;
- The mobile environment;
- The client server;
- The application;
- The security.
Network application optimization is generally a wider picture than just the WAN, but WAN is still a fundamental part of it, because it is that delivery of application over the network which is often the pinch-point or the place, where the perceived problem is.
