IT organizations face pressure to increase productivity, improve application performance, support global collaboration, improve data protection, and minimize costs. In today’s WAN-centered environments, traditional LAN-oriented infrastructure approaches are insufficient to meet these goals. Application Acceleration and WAN Optimization Fundamentals introduces a better solution: integrating today’s new generation of accelerator solutions to efficiently and effectively scale networks beyond traditional capabilities while improving performance and minimizing costs through consolidation.

Ted Grevers and Joel Christner begin by reviewing the challenges network professionals face in delivering applications to globally distributed workforces. You learn how accelerators are transforming application business models, enabling IT departments to centralize and consolidate resources while also delivering consistently superior performance.

Grevers and Christner show how to identify network consumers, prioritize traffic, and guarantee appropriate throughput and response times to business-critical applications. You learn how to use quality of service techniques such as packet classification and marking and traffic policing, queuing, scheduling, and shaping.

Next, you compare options for integrating accelerators and optimization services into your network and for optimizing content delivery. The authors show how to address application protocol-related performance problems that cannot be resolved through compression or flow optimization alone. In the final chapter, the authors walk you through several real-world scenarios for utilizing accelerator technology.

* Provide high-performance access to remote data, content, video, rich media, and applications
* Understand how accelerators can improve network performance and minimize bandwidth consumption
* Use NetFlow to baseline application requirements and network utilization
* Ensure network resources are allocated based on business priorities
* Identify performance barriers arising from networks, protocols, operating systems, hardware, file systems, and applications
* Employ application-specific acceleration components to mitigate the negative impact of latency and bandwidth consumption
* Integrate content delivery networks (CDN) to centrally manage the acquisition, security, and distribution of content to remote locations

* Leverage WAN optimization technologies to improve application throughput, mitigate the impact of latency and loss, and minimize bandwidth consumption
* Optimize the performance of WANs and business-critical WAN applications


This book is part of the Cisco Press® Fundamentals Series. Books in this series introduce networking professionals to new networking technologies, covering network topologies, sample deployment concepts, protocols, and management techniques.