4.5. Alternatives for Network Performance

There are two schools of thought when it comes to accelerating network performance for centralized servers and remote branch offices. Both are caching or local transmission replay solutions that sit between the server and the client. The first is what we will call a wide area file network. It is a solution built to accelerate file server performance. That's pretty much all it can do. The second is sometimes called a wide area data network (WADN). The WADN attempts to accelerate all traffic based on TCP using cached data. The data is build by breaking up TCP transmission streams into smaller blocks that are uniquely identified using an algorithm. It is pretty successful, but it relies on seeing previously transmitted identical blocks of traffic.

The downside to both of these solutions is that there is a pretty significant capital investment required. They also can have certain restrictions such as being unable to accelerate certain types of signed or encrypted data because they can be viewed as "man-in-the-middle" hackers because of the way they operate. There is also the risk that these third-party hardware vendors don't keep up with the protocol advancements of the operating systems and applications and fail to accelerate those protocols or, worse, even break them. These hardware solutions will accelerate network performance for your legacy computers such as Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.