Expand Solutions

SERVER CONSOLIDATION

The Mandate

Efficiency Through Cost Reduction and Simplicity

Server consolidation projects promise both cost reduction and simplicity. Not only will the costs of hardware and software licensing be reduced in almost all cases, but the simplified architecture improves the quality of management, reduces many security risks, simplifies backup and recovery activities, and can even improve the auditing capabilities. The business logic for server consolidation is the same regardless of whether the project consolidates email servers, storage or application servers, or even the specialized case of file servers (WAFS). There is a clear bottom line benefit to the IT budget as well as improvement in the productivity of the IT workforce.

The Challenge

Cost Reduction Versus Performance

The reality of server consolidation, is that while costs are reduced, performance can also be compromised. Rather than interacting with a local server, applications and users must now traverse the WAN whose performance characteristics differ remarkably from the LAN. To start, traversing the WAN means dealing with latency, which coupled with the chatty nature of applications, often translates into a performance slow down that affects productivity. Additionally, with less available bandwidth, the WAN is wrought with congestion. The combination of latency and congestion will degrade performance and increase user frustration and delay. While benefits of server consolidation projects are compelling, poor performance and increased user frustration may lead to project failure.

Expand's Server Consolidation Solution

Expand's solution enables server consolidation projects to succeed by mitigating the negative influences of the WAN on the user and application traffic.

Acceleration

Expand offers two forms of acceleration to mitigate the effects of WAN latency on your traffic; first with plug-ins focused on specific applications (Application Acceleration) and second focused on the general infrastructure of applications (Protocol Acceleration). Combined they dramatically reduce the effect of chattiness on performance, which translates to a perceivable performance improvement. In fact, the change is so effective that most users will not notice the change from accessing local servers to accessing consolidated servers over the WAN.

WAN Optimization

While Expand's Acceleration improves the responsiveness of applications, Expand’s WAN Optimization ensures this improvement is always available. As congestion from competing applications attempt to take away bandwidth and reduce performance, Expand's QoS ensures that business critical applications and their optimizations are not compromised. As the additional server consolidation traffic on the WAN can potentially impact existing application performance, the multiplicative effect of Expand's compression not only makes up for this short-coming, but often provides a surplus of bandwidth to fuel growth.

WAFS

Wide Area File Services (WAFS) is a specialized form of server consolidation working specifically with file servers and the inefficient Common Internet File Services (CIFS) protocol. Building on the Acceleration and WAN Optimization technologies, Expand adds a CIFS-specific optimization that fits in the existing Microsoft Domain, dramatically improving performance, while retaining all user and security controls, such as SMB signing, in place. Additionally, should the central file servers become unavailable, a unique "WAN-Out" mode automatically starts, giving local users access to files according to their system permission, allowing them to continue working through the crisis. The complementary nature of Expands' comprehensive solutions deliver a WAFS solution with unrivalled performance and reliability.

Datasheets:

• Expand ss server consolidation

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