Lessons Learned from Gartner Data Center Event
- By: Silver Peak
- On: 12/09/2009 10:18:51
- In: Uncategorized
Last week Silver Peak was exhibiting at Gartner’s Data Center conference in Vegas. I took this as an opportunity to meet with many of the Gartner analysts who cover projects that benefit from WAN optimization but don’t necessarily cover WAN optimization directly – initiatives like cloud computing, cloud storage, disaster recovery, unified communications, and desktop virtualization. At the same time, I met with quite a few Gartner clients who are in the midst of many of these important projects. Here are my thoughts...
The good news is that most people recognize the importance of having a solid WAN infrastructure in support of key data center initiatives. The bad news is that not everyone realizes exactly why WAN optimization is critical to these initiatives.
For example, most people understand issues with WAN bandwidth - limited capacity, high cost, and difficulty with procurement. However, many folks don’t realize that all the bandwidth in the world won’t help some data center initiatives if latency (caused by distance) or packet loss (caused by congestion) also exist. For example:
· Desktop virtualization is very susceptible to latency/loss. When these conditions are present, screen refresh rates become painfully slow, creating a poor end user experience.
· Voice and video quality suffers dramatically when packets are dropped or delivered out of order.
· Data replication throughput can be reduced to a crawl when latency and/or packet loss prevent high sustained data rates (regardless of available bandwidth). This can jeopardize well defined recovery point and time objectives (RPO/RTO).
If you are interested in learning more about the impact that latency and loss have on various IT initiatives (and their relationship to WAN bandwidth), I’ve posted a selection of interesting analyst reports here.
