Latency is the bane of my existence. Latency is the kind of thing you just can’t typically fix when you’re talking site-to-site communications. But you can mitigate it. These days I’m experimenting around with a variety of WAN optimization tool kits, from Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to F5 to various open source offerings. For SMB/CIFS the various offerings can be pretty cool. Most products require an appliance at both ends to do proper optimization, but I like that Riverbed has a client app that can run on the Mac. Having said that, nothing seems to really optimize AFP the same way that SMB can be optimized. Maybe there isn’t a market…
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WAN Acceleration Magic Quadrant
WAN Acceleration has been a hot topic for some time. But over the past couple of years the cost of acceleration technology has dropped drastically due to its emergence as a full-blown market. Riverbed has jumped to the top of the leaders circle for a number of reasons, with Juniper, Blue Coat, Cisco, Packeteer, etc in its wake. For the most part, all WAN accelerators are going to have a few things in common. There are a pair of appliances, each with a disk that can cache files going between two points. To some degree, the purchase of accelerator appliances should be driven by the protocols to be used. For example, if you’re a…