How We Can Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments

This is the fifth of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon.  

There is an answer to the SharePoint WAN performance issue. Organizations can overcome WAN performance limitations and avoid major productivity losses, massive user revolt, and reactive unplanned investments to fix them. According to Gartner, adding a third party WAN Optimization Solution can improve SharePoint response times in a WAN environment by up to 10 times, and in some cases reduce bandwidth requirements by up to 95%.

Organizations must consider Wan Optimization/Application acceleration solutions that provide the following:

• Network Optimizations with traffic prioritization and link usage optimization

• Application/SharePoint-specific optimizations with object handling and page rendering acceleration

• Robust Data reduction through data compression and data deduplication

• Security through the ability to optimize SSL traffic

• A virtualized solution  with support for multiple hypervisors

• Support for smaller offices through virtualization or  Windows-based solution

• Management through centralized management and deployment wizards

Different paths lead toward success in different situations:

• For existing deployments: Try a pilot with a select group of users or a specific sub-application to get feedback on the user experience and measure the performance improvements. Roll out more widely if the pilot is successful.

• For new deployments: Include WAN Optimization/ Application Acceleration in the planning process.

There are a couple of categories of available solutions to address the WAN optimization/Sharepoint Acceleration issue:

Software-only, hardware and hypervisor agnostic solutions like those provided by Certeon.

or

Physical Appliance-based, proprietary software/hardware solutions like those provided by Riverbed.

In my next, and last, post in this series I cover: Why It is Critical to Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments