As businesses continue to transition to a global information-based economy, more enterprises are refining work processes and coordinating their resources to improve business efficiency. The network is an obvious platform to facilitate the achievement of these goals. However, as enterprises expand their scale and extend their markets, they must increase their branch presence. How can a company improve the access and operation speed of its ERP, CRM, Notes, FTP, network neighborhood, email, OA, and other application systems, in its distributed network? How can a low-cost, high-efficiency, high-security, and easy-to-manage platform for networking be created?

 

Take Crystal CG, one of the world’s largest visual technology application service companies in the design industry, for example, when its overseas branches attempt to download video, audio, and graphic files from servers at its Beijing headquarters, transmission speed was very slow. During peak hours, average transmission was as low as 9.8kbps (as slow as an old telephone modem). Transmission of a large video file of many megabytes or even gigabytes could take one or more hours. Even worse, staff members often found that after hours of waiting, the line could be disconnected right before receiving the final data segments and the whole process would have to be repeated. Needless to say, this resulted in tremendous waste of time and effort, slowing down production speed and efficiency. It also frustrated even the most optimistic employees.

 

Overseas staff frequently complained about this bottleneck.

The example above is not uncommon. In fact, many enterprises with distributed network infrastructure encounter the same network issues.

 

Problem Analysis
What are the factors causing a business system to increasingly respond slowly? There are two reasons:

 

The first reason is the manner of operation of an enterprise’s application systems. ERP, CRM, Notes, and similar applications only send a few packets of information with each transmission, but these transmissions happen very frequently. When packet loss begins to occur, applications across the entire system will be seriously affected. When network delay reaches 100ms or longer, these applications will operate slowly. With multiple business systems affected by high latency and high packet loss, the entire user experience will suffer tremendously.

 

Another reason for network slowdown is the way in which lines are deployed when enterprises initially build their networks.

 

Lines to link an enterprise’s headquarters and branches fall into two categories: private lines and VPN. Private lines provide better communication quality than VPN. However, many business systems are developed for LAN operation, and such systems lack the mechanism to guarantee high performance with lower quality links. And private lines are also expensive. Internet-based VPN provides the benefits of low costs and flexible deployment, but comes with the drawbacks of higher latency and more packet loss.

 

WAN Acceleration
By leveraging TCP Proxy, SANGFOR’s high-speed transmission protocol (HTP), and Flash-link mechanisms, SANGFOR’s acceleration products help enterprises optimize the transmission quality of lines with high latency and high packet loss, delivering link quality guarantees to improve the performance of remote application access. With application-layer protocol proxying, SANGFOR’s products effectively improve the message interaction rates of CIFS and ERP applications over the WAN, delivering a LAN-like communication experience. Finally, by utilizing “byte caching,” LZO stream compression, and QoS functions, SANGFOR WANO products effectively decrease redundant data in WAN, and distributes different bandwidth resources to different business systems to provide bandwidth guarantees and improve application system responsiveness.

 

SANGFOR WANO products can be deployed in a number of modes including gateway mode, bridge mode, one-arm mode, and others. Flexible deployment modes guarantee that when customers upgrade their networks, the existing network environment will not be affected and enterprises will not have to suffer negative impact from temporary downtime and business suspension during upgrades.

 

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