There exist several WAN acceleration devices, like Riverbed Steelhead appliances, that reduce WAN traffic through various compression and data reduction techniques. These devices all have in common that they are very expensive, too expensive to make a business case compared to just upgrading WAN bandwidth.
I was wondering if there are any open source based solutions that do WAN acceleration ?
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>We have looked at them and they are typically much cheaper than upgrading bandwidth.
This is not so in our case. We use a 10Mbit fiber connection and the cost of a pair of Riverbed boxes is 5 times higher than the yearly cost of upgrading this connection to 20Mbit.
We're using this connection for offsite data replication & backup.
Which models where you looking at? IIRC to support 10Mbps of raw throughput it would cost about $40K for a pair and I would think that the cost of difference between a site-to-site 10 and 20 Mbps connection would be more than $8K a year, that is less than $700 a month for a 10Mbps bump up. Unless, of course, you get a real good deal or the two sites are fairly close to each other.
For data replication there is not a whole lot you can do, as you would need transparent data compression inline. However for backups, there are a few options such as "PKZip" type products or products that are "client/server" type backups that support data compressions, such as IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).
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by: giltjrPosted on 2008-01-11 at 06:38:56ID: 20636613
Well there are some, but for limited functions. Example, if all you want to compress is HTML data from Web sites you can use Apache as a proxy server with gzip/deflate.
However, you really need to look at the costs. We have looked at them and they are typically much cheaper than upgrading bandwidth. Remember these devices are designed to be used over private WAN link, not the public Internet. Private links are very expensive, in the range of 2-5 times what a Internet connection may cost, but they provide guaranteed througput, where as the Internet is not guaranteed.
Are you looking at this for things like File and Print Sharing and non-Web based applications or just Web based applications.