News, Press, & Events

ACCELERATION 2.0: Symmetric and Asymmetric Web Acceleration in One Solution

August 20, 2007 - Enterprise Networks & Servers, Lori MacVittie

A key to business success today is flexibility. But to succeed, the infrastructure and application architectures that support web-based mission-critical processes must be as agile, dynamic and ready to adapt to volatile market conditions as the business itself. An increasingly distributed - and impatient - community of end-users threatens the ability of businesses to reap the benefits of new architectures and applications such as SOA and Web 2.0 due to poor application performance. End-users are demanding faster response times regardless of their location and method of connectivity, while the increasingly interactive nature of new web applications takes it toll on the client, network, and servers alike.

Traditional solutions to application performance problems require either compromise or increased investment. Traditional WAN optimization solutions are inflexible, providing increased performance only for a limited set of end-users, and traditional web application acceleration technology does not offer a symmetric deployment option that enables LAN-like speeds over the WAN. In the past, businesses have been forced to choose one or the other, or face diminishing returns by deploying both. A new breed of web application acceleration technology is needed; one that is flexible and offers both symmetric and asymmetric web acceleration options in a single solution.

NEW CHALLENGES

Even as organizations have been centralizing data centers in an effort to reduce costs, increase regulatory compliance, and improve security, the end-users serviced by those data centers have become increasingly distributed across remote and home offices. Mergers, acquisitions, and a higher rate of broadband saturation have furthered this trend as well.

While many remote office locations remain connected via a dedicated WAN, increasingly it is difficult to justify the cost of a dedicated pipe when a remote office may be home to only a few employees. The problems inherent in relying on dedicated lines are further exacerbated by the aforementioned increasingly mobile workforce. The Internet is often the easiest and most reliable mechanism upon which IT can rely to deliver key organizational applications to this distributed workforce.

Unfortunately, those key organizational applications that are so critical to conducting business weren't designed to be delivered over a WAN, and performance of applications such as email, customer relationship management, and sales force automation is often inefficient as well as painful for the end-user. Inefficiencies in the applications themselves - as well as the nearly ubiquitous use of HTTP to deliver applications today - introduce performance problems that often require the introduction of external, point solutions designed to optimize and accelerate applications over non-LAN speed connections. Further aggravating the performance problem is the desire to utilize SSL to secure the sensitive data exchanged between end-users and corporate applications.

ACCELERATION 1.0

Traditional web acceleration products have always provided the means by which delivery of HTML and associated web content is cached, optimized and accelerated. These solutions are generally deployed in the data center, near the servers on which the applications in need of acceleration are deployed, and act as a reverse proxy - intercepting requests and delivering responses nearly as fast as if the end-user were on the same LAN.

These web acceleration products work ubiquitously for both customers and remote or mobile end-users. Their ability to provide caching and connection management offloads processing from servers and improves the overall capacity - and performance --of web applications. Technology that reduces the inherent chattiness of the HTTP protocol improves performance, while compression is applied to reduce the growing size of data exchanged between the browser and the server. That's good news for consolidation efforts as you can serve more users with fewer resources and do so faster. But these solutions don't take advantage of situations where the organization owns the dedicated line between the data center and the remote office.

The solution to that problem was yet another form of optimization, WAN optimization, in which devices deployed at both ends of the WAN provide improved compression through data reduction techniques and caching. These solutions, however, do not specifically address the issues inherent in HTTP that cause performance to become sluggish. Additionally, the increase in use of Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, discussion forums and blogs with constantly changing data are not adequately optimized by traditional WAN optimization solutions because of the high rate of change. Worse, the decision to use only WAN optimization does not address the acceleration needs of remote users and customers who are not located at enabled remote offices.

Then customers began demanding visibility into the business processes in which they participate, such as order processing and shipping information. As employees became even more mobile, it became necessary to secure access to those applications using SSL. Unfortunately, traditional solutions don't, and often can't, address acceleration of SSL encrypted application traffic, leaving remote users right back where they started--with a poorly performing web application.

OTHER SOLUTIONS

There are other solutions to web application performance issues, but most of them either come at a high cost in terms of budget or time, or aren't a complete solution. You could rewrite the web application to improve performance, but that takes time and, of course, budget. You could implement a reverse proxy cache, but that does not reduce end-user response times; it only decreases the burden on web application servers.

You could buy more servers in the hopes that reducing the load on each will result in better response times and increased capacity. And while that might indeed work, this increases costs in terms of maintenance, power, and cooling and leads to longer ROI cycles than is often desired by the organization.

You could choose a Content Delivery Network (CDN) solution. This can certainly aid in improving overall response time as it moves static content closer to the end-user, but it does little to nothing for dynamic content, and it can't address the issue of performance for serving confidential (SSL encrypted) content. Remote office users can't share cached content from a CDN - which decreases the benefits for remote offices, and bursting costs are often high and uncontrollable, making them difficult to budget for.

A new solution is required, one that pairs web application acceleration with WAN optimization for a solution capable of accelerating SSL and web applications for all users, no matter where they're located.

ACCELERATION 2.0

The next generation of web acceleration solutions solves the problems inherent in both existing WAN optimization and web acceleration solutions by addressing the issues of web application performance through a combination of flexibility and advances in technology.

This new breed of web acceleration solutions are capable of supporting both traditional asymmetric and symmetric deployments simultaneously, providing improvements in performance to all users, regardless of location. Flexible deployment architecture means that the benefits of a symmetric solution - better use of bandwidth, higher compression and caching rates - can now be achieved for web applications. The ability to simultaneously support asymmetric acceleration scenarios means that when the cost-benefit analysis of deploying a symmetric solution recommends against a symmetric solution deployment at a remote office, the users at that location can still benefit from traditional asymmetric acceleration features.

A symmetric solution provides caching at the remote office locations, which allows content to be shared by all users at a remote office. Caching capabilities, compression, and optimization of HTTP reduces the bandwidth used between the remote office and data center - a huge benefit for many organizations with dedicated lines that may pay hefty bursting fees if they exceed allocated bandwidth. This ability can also reduce the traffic flowing through a CDN, which can in turn reduce high and unpredictable bursting fees. In some cases, deploying a symmetric web acceleration solution can take the place of a CDN, providing the same location-based performance benefits as well as the ability to pre-position content at remote sites for quicker access and reduced bandwidth usage.

Additionally, the ability to accelerate SSL encrypted content means that content previously unable to be accelerated and optimized can now be addressed before being delivered, improving the performance of the application as well as reducing bandwidth use, often leading to decreased WAN congestion.

The most important aspect of this new generation of acceleration solutions is that it is flexible, supporting a hybrid deployment model that provides the best available web application performance to the end-user at the time the application is accessed. Whether the user is at a remote office or on the road, accessing corporate web applications over a dedicated WAN or the public Internet, the new generation of application acceleration solutions combines the best possible application acceleration offered by both traditional WAN optimization and application acceleration devices into a single, flexible solution. ENS

Lori MacVittie is a technical marketing manager for application services at F5 Networks.