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The Wide-area Data Services solution is sometimes confused with other application acceleration products. With so many vendors claiming to deliver "application acceleration" devices, it is important to realize different approaches and their limitations.

With innovations in various areas of WAN performance, the throughput of applications over WANs has historically been quite bad. Some solutions focus on bandwidth expansion, while others optimize specific protocols, some attack the problem by caching, and others by prioritizing traffic. While compression, caching, QoS, WAFS, and other technologies have their place, until now no vendor has provided a fully-integrated solution that addresses the multiple root-causes of poor application performance. Only Riverbed provides the ultimate solution to WAN problems, by enabling Wide-area Data Services (WDS).

Riverbed addresses all the key factors that make application performance slow by WANs: high latency, limited bandwidth, "chatty" transport protocols, and even "chattier" applications.

Learn more about any of these common approaches to application acceleration

Beware the Bolt-on Approach As vendors have understood that the approaches above don?t meet the requirements of organisations, they have tried to partner with other companies or acquire other technologies to try to overpower the market and become the leader. The problem with this method, however, is that these products put together often still have limited capabilities and can be incredibly complex to manage. Furthermore, these vendors face the challenge of integrating multiple disparate architectures, leading to a haphazard, inconsistent approach to accelerating applications.

Look Beyond the Standard Checklist With some vendors adding functionality now and then, it is getting harder to differentiate one application acceleration provider from another. In order to do so, you can use a few simple criteria:

• How quick can the product accelerate the applications that you care about the most? Don't let vendors tell you what applications are the most important; you should tell them.
• Go beyond the top-level check. Vendors like to claim they have "fully functional" features when they often have just scratched the surface. For example, consider CIFS protocol acceleration. If a vendor says they have CIFS acceleration, go into more detail and understand what they mean by that: Can they accelerate folder copying as well as file copying? Can they accelerate browsing as well as file reads? What about accelerating CIFS from within Microsoft Office applications? And what about accelerating CIFS from within non-Microsoft applications?
• How easy is it to deploy the product? Make sure vendors have designed in functionality such as transparent deployment, auto-discovery, and central management so that you don't have to spend significant amounts of time monitoring your acceleration devices.

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