WAN Optimization Controllers (WOC) and Wide-area file services (WAFS).

Besides on-line backups and data replication, one of the main benefits that deduplication technologies provide, is WAN Optimization.

Typically, WAN optimization controllers (WOC) mitigate the sometimes severe impact of network latency on the performance of applications and the underlying protocols. Through data reduction and prioritization techniques, WOC can also help organizations avoid costly bandwidth upgrades. In other words, WAN optimization improves the performance of business applications over WAN connections.

The main benefits of WAN optimization are:

• Ensuring fair access for mission-critical applications during periods of congestion by prioritizing business-critical traffic, through QOS policing and traffic shaping.
• Reducing the bandwidth required to transfer WAN traffic, by applying deduplication algorithms.

Combinations of these WAN Optimization technologies significantly reduce the amount of data going across the WAN while dramatically increasing the effective data throughput. Production results have shown increases of 300% to 2,000%.

There are two types of WAN optimization: One is for branch office to data center and is called branch data replication optimization (B-DRO). It is generally a low speed link. The other is for data center to data center data replication optimization (D-DRO).

On the other hand, there is a technology called Wide-area file services (WAFS) which also resolves some of the limitations of WAN communications.

WAFS is a storage technology that makes it possible to access a remote data center as though it were local. In other words, it makes centralized applications appear as if they are local to the branch office.

WAFS caches the last generation of a file in an appliance at the branch office, using data reduction in order to reduce the size of the local cache. It is here where data deduplication becomes a key component of any WAFS appliance.

Unlike WAFS, WAN optimization assumes that data is moving between applications at each site and is completely transparent to the applications. To achieve that goal, WAN optimization uses delta caching and other techniques to eliminate repetitive features of WAN traffic, enabling data to travel faster to remote sites.

How can WAN optimization and WAFS controllers be implemented with Kondar technology?

WAN optimization and WAFS controllers can benefit from Kondar technology because Kondar can provide deduplication capabilities from data streams.

The process could be as follows:
1- Kondar receives a stream with new data (incoming stream) from the host application.
2- Kondar compares the incoming stream with the local cache previously stored.
3- Kondar creates an output stream with the differences, which is sent to the remote controller.
4- At the remote controller Kondar is able to restore the incoming stream from the output stream that was sent by the remote controller and the local cache.
5- Finally Kondar adds the unique data (output stream) to the local cache of the remote controller. In this way it won’t be necessary to send this data through the WAN connection again.

All of this would be done at byte-level. This approach is also known as delta-based caching deduplication.

The main feature of Kondar is that it’s able to do this deduplication process very fast.

In those cases where the communication is one way, Kondar can deduplicate the stream without storing the local cache in the first controller. Kondar just needs to store a small file with some information about the remote controller cache in order to compare the incoming stream with the remote cache. In this way, the local cache is only required for the restoration process. This approach involves an important HD reduction, leading to price reductions and increased competitiveness of your products.

There are many of other possibilities and we will be happy to discuss the best approach for your product.