Virtualization drives the rise of WOC market

Because of the impact of virtualization and server consolidation projects, the WAN Tuning Controller (WOC) market has grown rapidly and market demand has continued to be strong.

"Many vendors are selling these products with the idea of ' my product is better than yours ' because most of them do a good job of accelerating," said Andy Rolfe, Gartner's research director. And now they have about 10% improvement in performance. ”

WOC combines the following technologies to speed up the connection between WANs and servers:

• Data compression, caching, and replication
• Transport management, including quality of service classification and traffic adjustment
• General Protocol Acceleration
• Accelerated transmission specifically for applications

In fact, WOC is now well known and does have a very good application effect. This shows that when virtualization and server consolidation Technologies cause branch offices to remove servers, and instead centralize operations in the enterprise room or data center, WOC is an intelligent sourcing option. However, WOC is also widely welcomed in other environments: one is very high-end, that is, connecting multiple data centers to provide backup and redundancy, and the other is very low-end, connecting mobile users and remote office staff to the enterprise server to improve the performance of running applications.

Therefore, the form of WOC is beginning to change. WOC, which is connected to multiple data centers, has a high bandwidth connection, which is more of a powerful hardware application, while the woc of a branch office may be a hardware application or a virtual application running on a general-purpose computer. Ultimately, the functionality of WOC will begin to shift to the branch office.

Another trend is toward software WOC that run on end-user devices, which WOC often have more limitations in functionality than specialized hardware WOC. "Of course there is a demand for software WOC," says Rolfe. If an organization centralizes their file servers, even a 8 Gigabit DSL connection is slow, and high bandwidth connectivity does not help reduce latency in a protocol such as CIFS. Software WOC is becoming an important factor in enterprise selection system. ”

Another selection criterion is the acceleration for a particular application. Most WOC provide CIFS and HTTP acceleration, as well as the acceleration of applications such as SQL and Oracle. In addition, the acceleration of a subset of SSL encryption is also common. "Manufacturers are stepping up their pace," says Rolfe. People are interested in VDI, so there are often people who consult us for special applications such as AutoCAD. ”

There is now a trend that has once again aroused interest in quality of service and transmission management, reporting and control. More than 10 years ago, people had a high level of attention to these technologies, but later, as data compression and caching emerged, it faded.

"It seems that people are most concerned about speeding up their transmissions when they are in trouble," says Rolfe. But service quality and bandwidth management seem to be the next step in acceleration. Enterprises will consider how to measure, monitor, and predict the amount of traffic after they implement the acceleration so that they do not experience performance problems again. ”

In this trend, two manufacturers stand out. One is the accelerator maker Blue Coat, which acquired the transmission management vendor Packeteer in 2008. The other is riverbed, which acquired the network and application monitoring firm Mazu NX this January. Now, almost all other major accelerators offer some kind of transport management functionality.

As WAN connectivity increases capacity, the drop in bandwidth costs may also have some impact on the market. Higher bandwidth may alleviate some of the existing problems, but not all of them-especially those caused by delays. So, while many enterprise organizations already have higher bandwidth, they still want to have high-performance WOC for applications that use the "High traffic" protocol.

WOC can dramatically improve performance--application response times can increase by 10 times times or more, due to the use of some kind of acceleration technology in some environments. Rolfe that new trends could make WOC technology more important in the months and years ahead.

"With the spread of cloud computing and Web 2.0 applications, we will have more opportunities to benefit from these technologies and devices," he says. ”

This means that companies that want to stay strong in the future have a need for WOC.