Riverbed Wide Area Data Services (WDS)

Given the importance of anytime, anywhere application access, IT departments are turning to wide-area data services to improve and accelerate application performance across the wide area network (WAN). Using WDS, IT managers can provide LAN-like access to data and applications anywhere throughout the enterprise network, enabling real-time collaboration as well as effective IT consolidation.

Riverbed is the pioneer and market leader in WDS – the first comprehensive solution to a host of severe problems that plague enterprise applications operating across the wide area:

• Poor application performance
• Insufficient, expensive or congested network bandwidth into remote offices
• Difficulties in IT consolidation
• Challenges with slow remote data backup and replication

Unlike point products that improve one part of the wide area performance problem – like data compression, QoS, or TCP optimization – WDS is a comprehensive solution to application performance problems.

Riverbed's market-leading WDS appliances address all of the issues that affect application performance over the WAN, improving the throughput of applications enterprises rely on every day – including file sharing, email, backup, SSL, document management systems, and IT tools, as well as ERP and CRM solutions.

Wide-area Data Services

WDS encompasses several different product categories. Whether an organization is seeking to make the most of its existing investment in WAN bandwidth by reducing traffic, or aims to accelerate the performance of its global applications by addressing latency and chatty protocols, the optimal solution addresses all aspects of the problem at once.

WDS is the superset of several existing categories:

• Application acceleration
• WAN optimization
• Wide area file services (WAFS)
• QoS and traffic shaping
• Web caching

Unlike these individual approaches that only address a single cause of poor application performance across WANs, a complete WDS solution enables the benefits of all of these approaches within a single, unified architecture.

Using WDS, enterprises can improve application performance across the network typically by 5 to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, and can reduce WAN bandwidth utilization by 65 to 95%, simultaneously. These dramatic results allow businesses to take advantage of their networks, infrastructure, and applications in ways that they had never imagined possible.

An Integrated Approach to Improving Application Performance

WDS solutions accelerate applications by taking an integrated approach to application performance across the WAN. While some approaches solely focus on network optimization, or just concentrate on acceleration for a specific application, WDS combines an application-independent foundation that improves the performance of all applications running over TCP, with an application-specific set of modules that address chatty application protocols. This combination enables WDS devices to accelerate the applications that enterprises care the most about, and provides the ability to easily add more functionality over time. (For more details on the technical details of an implementation of WDS, read about the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS).

Improving application performance has tangible, meaningful benefits for organizations of all sizes. Enterprises use WDS to meet the following needs:

• Accelerate applications across the wide area network
• Optimize WAN bandwidth utilization
• Enable IT Consolidation
• Accelerate backup, recovery, and replication