Intelligent Acceleration

 

This section on Acceleration describes the Ipanema System features that reduce the response time of applications over the WAN.

 

Acceleration features allow to:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Accelerate while protecting critical application performance

 

Intelligent acceleration brings response time down so that it enables the appropriate quality of experience that users expect. It tightly combines with Ipanema Optimization’s ability to guarantee the performance of critical applications under the toughest conditions.

A combination of redundancy elimination, TCP acceleration and application acceleration mechanisms are dynamically applied under the control of Ipanema’s sophisticated global, dynamic optimization features.

 

Following the principles of autonomic networking systems, the mechanisms are triggered dynamically depending on the nature of the applications. The system automatically adapts these parameters in real-time based on a dynamic, global analysis of the traffic mix, user behavior and continuous tracking of WAN resource availability.

 

Intelligent Acceleration is:

  • Controlled: Acceleration features are tightly coupled with Ipanema’s Optimization.
  • Ipanema Optimization prevents Acceleration to create any congestions – even in meshed networks
  • The “virtual bandwidth” created by Acceleration is allocated through Optimization, i.e. according to business priorities
  • Transparent to the IT: Ipanema’s Acceleration does not require any change to the configuration of the IT (and vice-versa)
  • Transparent to the Network: Ipanema’s Acceleration only modifies the payload of the packets, it preservers layer 3 and 4 information and does not use tunnels
  • Able to manage all applications: Acceleration is complete and covers the 3 application performance bottlenecks (Bandwidth, TCP and Application Protocol) - Together with Optimization it addresses all types of applications: real-time, transactional and data-transfers
  • A la carte: Individual acceleration mechanisms can be deployed only where they are really required - A branch device is not always required to get the benefit of Intelligent Acceleration.

 

 

 

Locally cache and compress data using Redundancy Elimination

 

Ipanema's Redundancy Elimination is an advanced technology that reduces the amount of data transmitted over the network by compressing and locally caching traffic patterns in a cache in ip|engines located at branch offices.

 

The process frees network resources that are then immediately made available to applications (starting with the critical applications). As a result of the creation of this “virtual” bandwidth, applications perceive a network link as if it was much bigger than it is, leading to a reduction of response time.

 

Ipanema is able to efficiently compress and cache any type of application patterns – even interactive applications flows or those based on UDP through a dedicated Zero Delay Path. It is also able to compress and cache the patterns of very large files transported over TCP and keep them in memory over long periods.

 

Redundancy Elimination is based on state of the art algorithms that detect redundancies even in presence of modified or “shifted” copies of patterns present in its cache.

 

 


Unleash TCP performance using TCP Acceleration

 
 

The two key TCP performance limitations are its “slow-start” phases and the size of its “window” that results in its inability to use all the bandwidth available on longer delay, larger capacity connections (the “bandwidth delay product problem”).

 

The “slow-start” is the TCP mechanism that tries to discover what the available bandwidth is for each session. This mechanism is used by every individual session and relies on a progressive increase of the session throughput until it reaches the point where the link is congested. It assumes then that it has found the maximum available bandwidth. While it is slowly increasing how much bandwidth it is using, it is by definition not using all the bandwidth it could be, and thus is under-performing during that phase of the connection.  Some bandwidth is unused leading to a response time that is higher than it could be.

 

Ipanema's System leverages its knowledge of the optimum throughput for each session that is gained from the Visibility and Optimization features. With a “local acknowledge” mechanism in the ip|engine located near the source of traffic, Ipanema TCP Acceleration immediately sets each session to its optimum bandwidth, leading to an important improvement of the response time of numerous applications, including those based on HTTP or HTTPS.

 

The “bandwidth delay product problem” describes TCP’s inability to use all of the available bandwidth when the number of simultaneous sessions is low and when the product of bandwidth and delay is large compared to the TCP window size (TCP window size depends on TCP implementations on the client and the server).  For example, a backup performed at night with a single TCP session, on a high delay/high bandwidth link will use only a fraction of the available bandwidth leading to a backup duration that is much longer than it could be.

Ipanema addresses this issue by creating a virtually unlimited “window” size through controlling the packet transmission rate at the source.


Unlike any other solution on the market, Ipanema is delivering TCP acceleration features without the need for a device in branches (Tele-Acceleration). Devices are only required at the source of the application flows. 

 

  

 

Transparently accelerate legacy applications using Application Acceleration

 

Even though many CIFS performance issues are solved in Windows Vista and Longhorn, enterprises are not yet fully deploying this latest Microsoft technology. Those who need to access CIFS-based file shares over the WAN, after a storage consolidation phase for example, require a solution to improve the response time of CIFS operations.

 

Ipanema CIFS acceleration is based on the transformation CIFS protocol exchanges in order to minimize the protocol's vulnerability to delay and thus to deliver an appropriate response time when accessing remote file shares with CIFS over the WAN.

 

Optimizations on the protocol are achieved using the Intelligent Protocol Transformation technology that provides a generic framework for optimizing application protocol patterns that are eligible for prediction, aggregation or translation leading to a minimized application response time. 

 

 

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