January 10, 2005 (Storage Networking World) --
Many companies today are considering the idea of consolidating and centralizing their storage and servers that are dispersed among multiple locations. However, as Fanning/Howey Associates Inc. in Celina, Ohio, found, there are usually several steps that should precede centralization, including solving any WAN latency problems you might have. And as Fanning/Howey also found, that doesn't mean just throwing more bandwidth at your current architecture. To the contrary, as the company discovered, it is possible to have more bandwidth than you are using and still suffer poor WAN performance due to extended latency. Fanning/Howey, which does facilities planning and design for education organizations, operates 10 offices spread across five states in the Midwest. Although it maintains servers with storage at each office, the offices continually share files as they work on projects. In addition, the company runs Exchange locally at each office for e-mail. None of the data is stored centrally, which increases the cost of managing it. Altogether, the company operates 1.5TB of storage across 10 offices. It was when the organization's WAN contract was up for renewal in late 2003 that information services manager Thomas Foreman analyzed his WAN usage -- only to find that the company was using only about one-third of the bandwidth it had been buying. Yet even with a costly surfeit of bandwidth, moving data among the offices was slow, due to WAN latency. "The extra bandwidth only masked the latency problem," Foreman recalls. Chance meeting At a storage conference, Foreman bumped into Riverbed Technology Inc., a San Francisco-based start-up. Riverbed makes an appliance called Steelhead that speeds up the performance of data over WANs. Steelhead substitutes its more efficient protocol for TCP, chunks up the data into small (100-byte) pieces, tracks any changes to those pieces and adds compression, caching and TCP- and application-layer optimization. The upshot: It reduces latency, which speeds the data over WANs and increases the throughput. "Riverbed was talking about how bandwidth doesn't solve the latency problem. They could have been talking about us," Foreman recalls. "Still, it sounded too good to be true." Rather than take it on faith, Riverbed suggested Fanning/Howey participate in its try-before-you-buy program. The vendor would give Foreman two Steelheads for 30 days to test the technology. If it didn't fix the latency problem, Foreman could just send it back, no charge. When the units arrived, Foreman installed one in the Dublin, Ohio, office -- a 20-minute procedure with some help from a Riverbed technician -- and the other in the Indianapolis office, the company's largest. Road test Prior to installing the Steelhead appliance, Foreman tested WAN performance by sending various size files in Word,
Advance your BlackBerry(R) solution management know-how this July
Advance your BlackBerry(R) solution management know-how this July BlackBerry Technical Seminar, register today! Go to the webcast
Cut Data Center Energy Costs
Get this white paper now! (Source: Liebert) Cooling accounts for 35% of data center energy consumption. Discover strategies that can reduce cooling energy costs by as much as 40%, including simple steps you can take to get more from your existing cooling system and emerging technologies that can increase cooling capacity and data center density. Download this white paper
Download this Executive Briefing now (a $195.00 value), compliments of ProCurve Networking by HP. (Source: Computerworld) This briefing looks at the basics of network management, which tend to get lost in the dizzying array of products and processes. It also examines new tools that are on the way to help IT executives deal with management in the new era of automation.Download this Executive Briefing now (a $195.00 value), compliments of ProCurve Networking by HP. Download this executive briefing
White Papers
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services.
XenServer FREE trial
Citrix XenServer is the simplest and most effective way to virtualize and provision servers. XenServer combines comprehensive server virtualization capabilities with unparalleled scalability, performance, economics, and ease-of-use. Based on the open source Xen hypervisor, XenServer delivers fast performance, easy management, and advanced features such as live migration.
Accelerate your pursuit of perfection For almost 80 years, Kodak has been helping banks, insurance companies, healthcare providers, government agencies and other businesses produce billions of document images. So Kodak is uniquely positioned to know and deliverwhat customers want: easy-to-use scanners that output the best possible image quality. Download this white paper now!
Keys to Microsoft application acceleration: advances in delivery systems
Simply designing a data center that only deploys more servers, more storage, and more devices significantly increases network complexity and cost. You can now ensure significantly faster access to the Microsoft applications your users depend on.
Next Gen Load Balancing: 8 Things You Need to Handle Today's Network Traffic
Learn how you can replace your aging load balancer with a true web application delivery appliance that provides 100% availability through full Layer 7 awareness and intelligent traffic management and delivers web apps with the highest performance and security possible.
Learn why a $6.5 billion international producer and marketer of alcoholic beverages chose Citrix NetScaler to increase Web app performance and ensure high availability of global intranet and public Web sites.
Learn why a large US food processor chose Citrix NetScaler to securely deliver a new Oracle ERP solution to external partners and remote users. You'll learn how Welch's was able to add 250 new users without expanding their IT staff or taxing the availability of their network resources.