WAN-optimization appliances from such companies as Packeteer, Riverbed Technology and Silver Peak Systems have been instant industry darlings, surging to the top of enterprise priority lists with their speedy, performance-improving results and quantifiable ROI. By combining such technologies as compression, caching, wide-area file services, TCP optimization and SSL acceleration, these devices have made doing business over the WAN not only tolerable but in many cases preferable.

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Now vendors are hoping for follow-on hits with product improvements in client-side acceleration, network security and performance management.

Managing while optimizing

Performance-management technologies are becoming the add-on of choice for many optimization vendors looking to maximize the functions of their appliances. Coupling management capabilities and optimization lets network administrators use the reams of traffic and application data collected by acceleration tools to troubleshoot problems and identify areas in need of a performance overhaul.

For instance, when the network team at Rawlings Sporting Goods in St. Louis needed to figure out why the performance of a Web-based customer-order application was suffering, it turned to a WAN-optimization appliance from Packeteer rather than rely on traditional network-monitoring software. Packeteer's PacketShaper used a variety of techniques to speed traffic across the WAN and provided insight into performance problems, say Jack Matthews, director of MIS, and Richard Truex, manager of network operations.