WAN Traffic Cops

With all manner of traffic across the Internet continuing to grow exponentially, and crashes, downtime and network performance issues appearing to grow by the month, getting the best possible network performance can become a chore.

At the same time, more businesses are putting employees at branch offices or home offices instead of at headquarters, while simultaneously consolidating their IT resources.

With that in mind, the CRN Test Center examined three offerings aimed at making WANs more efficient—so traffic can move and work can get done. While a number of WAN optimization appliance vendors declined to provide products for us to review comparatively against their peers, there were a couple of vendors that made their software-based WAN products available, as did an open-source community that is working on a Linux-based solution.

Our methodology was straightforward: Software was installed on a simulated WAN and examined for ease of deployment and use, performance, features and cost. In the performance testing phase, files were transferred between endpoints on a WAN both with and without the optimization software to gauge whether it improved transfer performance.

We examined Replify Reptor Accelerator and GlobalScape's Availl 3.4.2.8312 Wide Area File System, both commercial solutions, as well as Traffic Squeezer, a new, alpha-version of an open-source WAN optimization solution.

Next: Replify Reptor Accelerator