At Apposite Technologies, we asked Trac Research to interview a handful of our customers to produce case studies on how WAN emulation is actually being used and what problems are being solved. The just-released report should be of great interest to readers of LoveMyTool, and is available for free download.
As readers of LMT know, WAN emulators are useful tools that simulate WAN bandwidth, latency, and other impairments to test application performance, but we wanted to find out exactly what customers were doing with them. Trac wrote short case studies of 4 different users, an insurance provider, a large bank, a global investment firm, and a cloud computing infrastructure host.
The insurance company purchased the emulators for a data center replication project, but now uses them to help troubleshoot the homegrown applications that the company depends on. In contrast, the bank, which likely has a similar infrastructure to the insurance company, uses the emulators for testing the end-user experience at local branches to eliminate performance bottlenecks.
The investment firm had been experiencing problems with application performance that weren’t discovered until users screamed. The applications worked great on the LAN and great at HQ, but were sluggish for users in the field. Now the company tests all applications prior to deployment to ensure a smooth, panic-free roll-out. In addition, they’re using the tool for visibility into the bandwidth requirements for different applications to help determine the needs for network expansion.
The cloud computing infrastructure company needed a way to prove to clients that applications would be just as responsive when hosted in the cloud instead of at the client’s headquarters. And what they often found was that many applications actually aren’t as responsive as they should be. The WAN emulator then became a versatile tool for the networking team to test performance and fix problems, for marketing to set realistic customer expectations, and for sales to demonstrate their service to customers.
Trac summarizes what readers of LMT already know: “Network emulation is playing an increasingly important role in the enterprise, as it has become a key enabler for effectively addressing challenges around network and application performance management.”
Author Profile - DC Palter is the President of Apposite Technologies, a leading vendor of easy-to-use, professional quality WAN emulation products. He previously held positions in marketing and engineering at Mentat/Packeteer (now Blue Coat), Hughes Electronics, Kobe Steel, and Honeywell. Mr. Palter is the author of two textbooks on WAN acceleration and the Osaka dialect of Japanese, and holds patents in network acceleration, satellite networking, and combustion technology. He earned an MBA from UCLA and a BS in Energy Eng. from Northwestern. Mr. Palter can be reached at dc@apposite-tech.com.
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