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Techworld Reviews WAN Optimization Appliances From Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix And Silver Peak

Thursday, 17 May 2007 by Michel Roth

Techworld.com has done a extensive review of four different Techworld Review WAN Optimization Appliances. They've tested the Blue Coat Systems SG8100, Cisco Systems Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), Citrix Systems WANscaler and the Silver Peak Systems NX Series Appliances. They've tested the WAN optimizersin their Syracuse University Real-World Labs. They tested under common use-case scenarios of T1 and T3 links with 50 milliseconds of one-way delay.

The Blue Coat Systems SG8100 seems to come out as the winner. I don't think they've tested the Citrix WANscaler and the other appliances in their capabilities geared toward Presentation Server environments. Here's a snippet about whay they had to say about the Citrix WANscaler:

"For bandwidth management, the WANScaler comes with two modes: HardBoost, the normal mode, is aggressive in optimizing bandwidth, while SoftBoost, which is used when in a mesh, is less aggressive. The difference comes into play when the appliances handle more traffic from more hosts; the varying modes enable IT to spread resources more evenly. Although we didn't see any resource exhaustion in our testing, we liked that the WANScaler can change bandwidth on a schedule. This is useful in cases where you know you have other traffic competing for the WAN pipe. Of course, if you're using QoS marking on your routers, this isn't a big deal."

Read the review here.