Tools for speeding sluggish applications traditionally are of two types: application-delivery controllers designed to ease the load on Web servers, and WAN optimization devices aimed at mitigating network latency and bandwidth constraints. Some say it’s time for these two to consolidate. (Compare application acceleration and WAN traffic optimization products.) 

"I'd like to see convergence of traditional data-center load-balancers and general WAN-optimization devices. It has always confused me that a convergence of those boxes has not occurred," says Michael Morris, network architect at a $3 billion high-tech company and a Network World blogger.

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The two product categories tackle different performance-related problems. Companies deploy load-balancers and traffic-management devices in the data center primarily to improve the performance of Web applications that users access over the Internet. WAN devices, on the other hand, are deployed symmetrically (at both ends of WAN links) and generally use such techniques as caching, compression and protocol acceleration to improve the performance of business applications that internal users access over dedicated WAN links. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products.)

Over time, however, the lines have blurred, and users are accessing business-critical applications - Microsoft SharePoint and SAP software, for example - across public and private networks. In addition, data-center gear and WAN appliances have grown to include some common features, such as compression and SSL optimization.

So, should the two categories be merged into a single product? Or if not merged, should they at least be better integrated so IT staff could take advantage of their respective acceleration talents to optimize applications from the data center to the desktop?

Morris makes a case for merging them. "It makes perfect sense that the same device that is essentially handing out the connections from the servers holds the data and then does everything it can to optimize that traffic down to the clients, which are generally around the world," he says.