NLIT 09 Presentation Page 1 Vision – Service – Partnership Page 1 WAN Acceleration Using Cisco WAAS Robert Morrow National Security Technologies LLC

NLIT 09 Presentation Page 2 Vision Service Partnership WAN Concerns NSTec has WAN links connecting 10 separate locations, with more than half of those supporting 100 users or less. Connectivity ranges from a T1 to a DS3 and this required IT to deploy core infrastructure services through local servers to provide a consistent and reliable level of service. Site collaboration on engineering drawings and conferences via Live Meeting have been less than desirable in the past, and with no low cost alternative available this problem has gone unresolved for years. The growth of data consumed by users has led to the IT server team to look for way to consolidate IT resources like , file/print, and application deployment to a centralized location so these larger files do not have to be stored in multiple locations, adding support cost. NSTec has also moved to a tapeless backup solution, but with vaulting across the WAN taking days to vault, corrective measures had to be taken.

NLIT 09 Presentation Page 3 Vision Service Partnership Impact of the WAAS Following successful testing using Cisco loaner equipment, entities outside of ISD provided funding to deploy Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) to 6 locations this year, impacting all of our major remote locations. Post-WAAS deployment has show a vast improvement of performance for users leveraging cross-site collaboration tools like Live Meeting and team center, leading to plans to deploy and utilize a centralized system. Plans to reduce the infrastructure footprint at remote sites by more than half with the removal of , file servers, and patch/application distribution servers. Virtual tape vaulting performance across the WAN was so poor, alternative solutions were looked at but WAAS has made the biggest improvement in this area, allowing us to stick with our original strategy. Optimization has reached up to 92% reduction of traffic on a 20GB transfer.

NLIT 09 Presentation Page 4 Vision Service Partnership WAAS Overview Cisco WAAS uses a centralized manager and a WAE at both end points of each WAN connection optimized. WAN routers are then reconfigured based on source and destination subnets to redirect some or all of the traffic passing across that link to a WAE device for optimization. Branch Office Regional Office WAAS Large Campus OR Data Center WAAS Mobile Server VPN WAAS Mobile Server International Mobile User WAAS Mobile SW over VPN Domestic Mobile User WAN Internet

NLIT 09 Presentation Page 5 Vision Service Partnership WAAS Overview Accelerates TCP performance over the WAN by using Traffic Flow Optimization (TFO) TCP Optimization Eliminates redundant data sent over the WAN – minimizes overall bandwidth usage Data Redundancy Elimination and LZ compression Optimizes application protocols, such as MAPI, CIFS, NFS, HTTP, Print eliminates protocol inefficiencies App-Specific Acceleration Streamlines video delivery - ensures one copy of live streaming transits the WAN Video delivery optimization

NLIT 09 Presentation Page 6 Vision Service Partnership What was the impact to NSTec? File SizeBaseline Transfer TimeWAAS Transfer Time 21 MB3 minutes 10 seconds3 seconds 98 MBFailed (est. 5 hours)24 seconds 132 MBFailed (est. 6 hours)27 seconds Baseline Test First month deployment stats

NLIT 09 Presentation Page 7 Vision Service Partnership More Detailed Look Stats over 1 st month of operation

NLIT 09 Presentation Page 8 Vision – Service – Partnership Page 8 Thank You. Special thanks to Apptis for giving me a presentation to steal from. Questions? Robert Morrow