Data center consolidation

Today’s IT organizations face increasing pressure to ensure server and network availability, improve service levels, and reduce costs. They are attempting to realize these business imperatives through a centralized data center that is capable of sharing network and computing resources. However, the very nature of centralizing data center resources which tend to be complex, while reducing complexity and achieving simplified and easier manageability is posing real challenges to IT organizations. Data center centralization and consolidation puts additional strain on wide area networks (WANs) as an increasing volume of traffic must pass between the data center and branch offices.

Reasons for data center consolidation.

• Reduce costs (staff, buildings and infrastructure complexity)

• Improve service levels and availability

• Make the most of network resources with WAN optimization and application acceleration

• Improve communication between departments by optimizing WAN connectivity

• Control network usage (bandwidth) on an application-level to prioritize traffic

What can be done to meet data center consolidation directives?

• Accelerate mission-critical applications to optimize performance
• Ensure all remote offices experience LAN-like application delivery over the WAN using optimization and acceleration technologies

• Offload server resources to ensure all traffic gets handled quickly and smoothly

Elements within data center consolidation that can lead to cost reductions and better manageability include.

• Reduction in physical locations
• Web and application servers

• Applications (e.g. HTTP, HTTPS, Web 2.0, XML, AJAX, etc.)

• Storage

• Networks

• Staffing

• Processes

Take full advantage of your WAN.

Organizations may notice that their data going over the WAN is not effectively utilizing the available bandwidth. They are many reasons for this, and users can experience considerable performance degradation. Latency adversely impacts traffic over long distances due to TCP session and HTTP connection turns, bloated and redundant data sent over the WAN add to congestion, and server resources are overburdened by handling many of the computational intensive tasks associated with the issues mentions above. Stampede’s family of WAN optimization and application acceleration products solve problems related to bandwidth constrained, high-latency networks, and TCP, web application and content delivery inefficiencies.

Stampede speeds WAN traffic from the data center to the end-user devices. We utilize a combination of TCP and application-level acceleration techniques, multiple compression, de-duplication and caching techniques to increase applications performance. Stampede provides multiple client and server offloading capabilities, client and server-side caching, multiple compression and image reduction techniques, and QoS / traffic shaping.

Our FX Series solutions help overcome satellite and terrestrial-based network congestion and latency, squeezing more traffic into satellite and terrestrial network links to provide the most effective use of the available bandwidth. This allows organizations that are consolidating their data centers to support a greater number of users and deliver more applications, without adding additional bandwidth and server resources. Stampede provides advanced technologies such as packet fragmentation to reduce the effect of large file transfers for applications such as CIFS and FTP, and real-time traffic (e.g. VoIP, Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services, etc.). Stampede also provides multiple security capabilities to protect organizations and applications from attacks – end-to-end.

The benefits of using Stampede

• Increase WAN bandwidth utilization and application throughput
• Accelerate data replication traffic across the WAN

• Remove the adverse effects of distance that cause latency

• Single-sided solutions (out-bound) accelerate web applications for remote and mobile users by up to 5x

• Two-sided solutions (out-bound and in-bound) accelerate application performance by up to 10x

• Significantly reduce bandwidth utilization by reducing the amount of redundant and uncompressed data sent

• Improve server capacity by offloading compute-intensive tasks

• Enable browsers to open more simultaneous connections between the browser and web application for increased parallel data transfers

• Get the most out of the bandwidth you are already paying for

• Ensure VoIP and thin client applications do not adversely affect remote office bandwidth

Click here to download the FX Series datasheet (PDF)