Branch office productivity is increasingly challenged by new application demands and regulations, but wide-area network technology addresses those issues.

Enterprises open branch offices for a variety of reasons: lower real-estate costs; the ability to hire personnel across disparate geographies; and better customer service.

But with these benefits come challenges:

• The cost of IT support. It's not always practical to dedicate an IT technician to a small office.
• Information storage. Each office must have dedicated storage and backup systems.
• Compliance concerns. Mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II require more rigorous record-keeping and data retention policies.
• Bandwidth issues. Remote employees are using more rich-media applications and video, which can severly affect bandwidth over wide-area networks (WANs).

The natural inclination is to centralize remote IT resources into the corporate data center, where expensive server and storage capacity can be consolidated, procedures for compliance and backup centrally controlled, and a degree of scalability established over the burgeoning landscape. However, centralizing file, print, and storage resources has its drawbacks:

• Wide Area Networks are much slower than local area networks (LANs).
• Long distances in the WAN add latency to file and print service requests.
• The protocols employed by commonly used applications such as word processors or spreadsheets often require hundreds or even thousands of round-trip client/server message exchanges for even the most trivial operations.

As a result, applications perform poorly over the WAN, and remote user productivity can be affected. So how does the enterprise balance the economic and legal benefits of centralized file and print service management with the traditionally high performance expected in its branches?

The Cisco Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS) solution helps enterprises gain the benefits of centralized servers and storage while maintaining LAN-like performance for remote users through the use of intelligent caching, proxy, and WAN transport optimization technologies. Deployed in the branch office's networking equipment, these capabilities resolve the performance problems users typically encounter when they access applications over the latency-prone, bandwidth-constrained, and over-utilized WAN.

WAAS offers a new state-of-the-art combination of performance, integration, and ease of deployment to support the most demanding business requirements in many ways:

Cost Reduction

WAAS eliminates the need for multiple, costly data components in each branch office. For example, rather than storing multiple copies of the same files across large numbers of locations that must be kept synchronized and secured, companies can keep a single copy of a file in the data center, enabling global collaboration.

It also eliminates the need for redundant file and print servers. If 50 branches each need the same 100 gigabytes of information and each has a copy, the enterprise must support 5 terabytes of data storage capacity. With 50 sites sharing one copy of the 100-gigabyte set of files, the enterprise experiences a 50-fold reduction in storage requirements.

Companies can also reduce the costs and management of server software and backup software, tape drives, cartridges, and cartridge shipping, as well as the administrative tasks associated with dispersed local file servers. IT staff can centrally manage file services such as usage quota, backups and restores, disaster recovery, access control, and security policies.

Comprehensive Performance Improvement

WAAS enhances performance at multiple levels to enable LAN-like application, file, and print service levels remotely:

• Latency and bandwidth reduction using application-specific adapters that suppress unnecessary messages, perform message and operation batching, and employ sophisticated caching techniques to minimize data transfers across the WAN
• Bandwidth and throughput improvement using techniques such as Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE), LZ Compression, and Transport Flow Optimization (TFO) based on extended TCP standards
• Transparent network integration, allowing WAAS to take advantage of traffic classification, QoS, policy-based routing, high availability, load balancing, and other network policies

Easier Deployment and Management.

Deployment and management are considerably simplified through WAAS transparent integration with the existing network. This facilitates:

• The preservation of existing network policies
• Automatic discovery across any network topology
• End-to-end visibility for ease of monitoring or troubleshooting

The result is a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO), greater application performance, more efficient WAN utilization and simplified data protection in an easy to implement package

Cisco WAAS is part of an extensible architecture for branch office optimization, and is works with existing routing platforms such as the Cisco Integrated Services Router, and value-added networking services such as NetFlow and QoS. Cisco WAAS is also part of the overall Cisco Application Networking Services (ANS) portfolio—a comprehensive range of application-aware network based services for improving the value and effectiveness of enterprise application deployments. The Cisco ANS product family includes technologies to enhance the full range of deployment scenarios including branch office, remote worker, data center and back-office application integration projects, all using a common foundation and enterprise quality.