Mobile and remote workers tend to get a raw deal with many having to put up with poorly performing connections. And the question of who benefits from mobility-based investment in most organizations is no longer the simple refrain of “road warriors and salespeople.”
Occasional home workers (employees traveling less than 30% of the time) depend on around-the-clock access to latency sensitive services like collaboration suites from Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. These inevitably cause throughput woes when any worker tries to access them from the road, an airport or even their homes.
As important (in some development-centric environments, more important) are the teams of outsourced labor that require access to remote systems resident inside your company’s firewall. These team members’ value is likely directly proportional to the throughput and related efficiency with which they can interact with internal systems.
- Accelerates Windows file sharing up to 95x with a 99% reduction in bandwidth utilization
- Improves Microsoft Exchange email attachment transmission up to 54x and reduces traffic by up to 97%
- Improves SharePoint HTTP (Wget for Windows) file save performance by up to 63x with up to a 99% reduction in traffic
- Speeds application performance over wireless data cards and VPNs
Both Riverbed and Blue Coat have developed robust WAN optimization solutions that benefit individual remote workers that have no access to optimized central or branch office connections.
In the case of branch offices large enough to justify them, hardware appliances are placed at WAN connections at both the central data center and the branch. The tandem combination permits sophisticated shaping, caching and compression technologies to operate between locations.
Riverbed’s Steelhead Mobile and Blue Coat’s ProxyClient use software to accomplish the efficiencies for a single user that the appliance does for the branch. The software keeps response times optimal even when users are away from the office appliance and communicating directly to application servers over cellular or other comparatively skinny links.
Application acceleration techniques include object and byte caching, general and data-specific compression, TCP spoofing and application-specific optimizations. Both reduce the number of messages and acknowledgements passed back and forth across the network for Microsoft Windows Common Internet File System (CIFS) to improve file access times by about 25 to 30 times.
Easy Deployment and Management
Both appliances deploy easily using Web interfaces to configure hostname, primary IP address and additional management ports. Acceleration policies determine what traffic to optimize and what to exclude (IP addresses, ranges, ports, protocols).
Managers administer both through GUI consoles and easily provision, configure and maintain remote clients visually. Alternatively, users can employ standard software provisioning services to distribute either application and automatically update end-user machines, minimizing ongoing administrative time and resources.
Riverbed Optimizes MAPI for MS Exchange
Steelhead Mobile provides targeted CIFS protocol optimizations in addition to data streamlining and transport streamlining. The resulting performance gains accelerate CIFS traffic by as much as 95 times.
Steelhead Mobile was the first wide-area data services (WDS) solution on the market to provide MAPI protocol optimization for Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007. Leveraging Riverbed’s optimization and application streaming capabilities for Exchange creates unparalleled performance gains for remote users. The unique multi-tiered Steelhead optimization approach makes sharing documents via email almost instantaneous while freeing up the WAN link for other applications.
Administrators set up the Mobile client according to endpoint policies and preload the application as an MSI package. They assign whether it runs transparently or users access it from the System Tray. They also determine the amount of physical space allocated to the local Data Store and assign which Mobile appliances it should contact.
Blue Coat Keeps Mobile Connections Secure
Blue Coat enhances its mobile client acceleration software with Web filtering capabilities. The manufacturer delivers them as a service from their network operations center. The software accommodates IT departments that allow split tunneling. That’s where a user connects directly to the Internet rather than back to the data center first where filtering would be applied. It enforces a company’s security policies on Internet-connected laptops.
Proxy Client improves file access and downloads as much as 35 times. At the same time, it continuously analyzes background Web content for hidden malware and rates new Web content.
With ProxyClient, administrators define which applications to accelerate and which to block based on security and bandwidth requirements. Organizations can be very granular in what they optimize and what they let flow through.
VistaOne
Whether your organization deploys Riverbed Steelheads or Blue Coat ProxySG appliances, VistaOne can help you develop a secure, affordable mobile and remote worker optimization strategy. If you haven’t settled on a platform, a VistaOne evaluation can give you the data you need to make decisions.
Resources:
(On-Demand Web Seminar) Mobility in a Virtual World - Enterprise Acceleration for All (Riverbed)
(On-Demand Web Seminar) Success Stories from the Mobile Enterprise (Riverbed)
Steelhead Mobile Feature Brief
(Video) Steelhead Mobile Live Demo
Blue Coat ProxyClient Datasheet
Blue Coat ProxyClient Specifications
Blue Coat ProxyClient Software Gains OESISOK Certification