• User friendly and can be deployed and configured in just 10 minutes using a web-based installation wizard
• Cost-effective solution for accelerating applications over the WAN
• Helps businesses improve application response times, maximize WAN investments, and control and prioritize key applications

Overview

The Juniper Networks WX platforms provide distributed enterprises with a cost-effective solution for accelerating applications over the WAN. Based on the unique WX Framework, which integrates all the elements required to optimize application performance, the WX platforms help businesses improve application response times, maximize WAN investments, and control and prioritize key applications.

The WX platforms improve application performance over the WAN by eliminating redundant transmissions, accelerating TCP and application-specific protocols, prioritizing and allocating access to bandwidth, and ensuring high availability at sites with multiple WAN links.

The WX platforms communicate constantly to provide distributed stateful intelligence about the entire network, exchanging vital information such as topology, reachability, and path-performance metrics. The WX platforms also interoperate with the Juniper Networks WXC application acceleration platforms, contributing to a complete, integrated WAN optimization solution.

The WX product family includes the WX 15, WX 20, WX 50, WX 60, WX 100, and WX Stack. These platforms provide compressed output ranging from 64 Kbps to 155 Mbps and support two to 2,000 remote sites each. Multiple communities of WX platforms can be configured to support an unlimited number of locations.

The WX platforms can be deployed and configured in just 10 minutes using a web-based installation wizard. The WXOS and WX Central Management System software also enable fully automated configuration; IT simply defines centralized configuration templates and, when remote WX platforms boot up, they retrieve a network address, locate the WX CMS server through the domain name service (DNS), download their configuration file, and begin operation.

Specifications

The WX platforms accelerate applications between corporate locations, enabling faster response times, reducing WAN bandwidth consumed, and prioritizing mission-critical traffic. These WX platforms scale to meet a range of WAN bandwidth levels, interoperate with the WXC platforms, and provide a comprehensive feature set to optimize WAN performance.

Framework

IT continually finds itself trapped between the conflicting requirements of keeping costs in check while providing users with new and faster applications. This conflict is most acute on the WAN, where costs are already high and getting applications to perform well is hampered by limited bandwidth and high latency.

To solve this dilemma, IT needs a cost-effective approach for optimizing WAN performance. That optimization must cut across several dimensions, solving issues related to bandwidth congestion and the redundant transmission of large files, high latency and loss, application contention for access to the WAN, inflexible transport options, and an overall lack of insight about what's happening over the WAN.

Solving these myriad issues requires an extensive feature set, which Juniper Networks delivers in its WX Framework for application acceleration:

• Compression with Molecular Sequence Reduction
• Caching with Network Sequence Caching
• TCP acceleration with Packet Flow Acceleration
• Application-specific acceleration with Application Flow Acceleration
• Bandwidth management with QoS and bandwidth allocation
• Path optimization with Policy-Based Multipath
• Visibility with WebView and WX Central Management System (CMS) software

Juniper Networks delivers industry-leading capabilities in each of these discrete technology areas, but the real value of the WX Framework derives from the integration of these technologies and the symmetrical deployment of the WX and WXC application acceleration platforms. Because these core technologies are integrated within the WX Framework, they impact, modify, and improve each other's capabilities and performance. Symmetric, or dual-ended, deployment of WX and WXC platforms increases the system capabilities because the devices continuously share information with each other and have knowledge of the WAN link from both ends. This distributed stateful intelligence enables the WX and WXC platforms to tune their settings for increased benefits and improves IT's understanding of the dynamic WAN environment.

How MSR and Sequence Caching Impact QoS

Elements of the WX Framework impact and improve the behavior of other elements. The WX and WXC platforms' compression and sequence caching techniques, Molecular Sequence Reduction (MSR) and Network Sequence Caching, have a powerful impact on how QoS policies are invoked on a WX or WXC platform. For QoS policies to operate accurately, they must know at all times the effective size of the WAN pipe. Since the instantaneous bandwidth of a link varies based on the effect that MSR compression and Sequence Caching have on the data being processed at that time, the additional WAN capacity they generate can change from packet to packet. As a result, the effective capacity of a WX-optimized WAN link continuously changes, which in turn requires QoS policies to dynamically react to these changes.

The WX QoS engine is tightly integrated into MSR compression and Sequence Caching, allowing its QoS policies to immediately detect changes in the effective WAN size and to adjust allocation and prioritization schemes appropriately.

For instance, if QoS learns that a given packet has been compressed 90%, and the QoS policy allows that application to consume up to 10% of the WAN link, it can allow many more of that application's packets to immediately traverse the WAN.

The immediacy and the granularity of this feedback into the QoS engine is the real strength of this integration. Standalone approaches to QoS cannot respond quickly enough to the dynamic changes in WAN throughput and so will either unnecessarily restrict an application's access to the newly created WAN bandwidth or not apply enough constraints, causing congestion and packet loss on the WAN.

Summary:
1. MSR and Sequence Caching change WAN pipe size.
2. QoS policies require knowledge of dynamic pipe size.

Benefit:
Avoids unnecessary restriction on application flow, maximizing WAN utilization, and eliminates excessive dropped traffic when compression - and therefore WAN throughput - changes.

Distributed Stateful Intelligence

The distributed stateful intelligence of the WX Framework improves the operation of the WX and WXC platforms and provides IT staff with a deep, continuous, and accurate understanding of the WAN. The distributed stateful intelligence communicates:

• The global WAN topology
• The link speed, latency, and loss characteristics of each end of a WAN link
• Instantaneous knowledge of protocol parameters such as window sizes and packets in flight
• A high degree of control over transport choice and application behavior for transmissions between sites

This information enables the WX and WXC platforms to tune their settings to better optimize WAN throughput and increase application performance. For instance, information about the speed, latency, and loss across a link enables the WX QoS policies to more accurately manage traffic flows. The tool tunes itself based on global knowledge of all key WAN parameters instead of just the local bottleneck on one side of the WAN.

Similarly, since the WX and WXC platforms on both ends of the WAN link have per-packet knowledge of all TCP parameters, the application acceleration features can accurately detect exactly when a flow is latency limited and immediately adjust protocol windows or acknowledgements to overcome this limit. Since TCP, for example, is an end-to-end protocol, all WX and WXC platforms across the WAN must share knowledge of it and synchronize their optimizations to guarantee end-to-end transparency and protocol reliability. This distributed TCP state across the WX and WXC platforms, achieved through the WX Framework, provides the devices with a unique and unified view into the TCP protocol on a per-flow basis, and it allows them to eliminate latency-induced inefficiencies that a single-ended, standalone solution would not be able to detect.

Technologies

Molecular Sequence Reduction (Compression)

Molecular Sequence Reduction (MSR) is the flagship compression algorithm of the WX and WXC platforms. The patented technology, which has enabled enterprises to realize as great as a 10-fold increase in WAN capacity, has its roots in DNA pattern matching. MSR compression recognizes repeated data patterns and replaces them with labels, dramatically reducing WAN transmissions. MSR technology operates in memory, and its dictionary can store hundreds of megabytes of patterns.

The MSR reduction capabilities benefit a broad cross-section of application types. It effectively reduces both short, chatty applications such as Citrix and HTTP as well as larger data patterns, such as Word files. Because MSR is dictionary based, it is able to eliminate patterns even when they are separated by large amounts of other data.

MSR compression provides immediate congestion relief to WAN links, enabling IT to improve application performance and avoid the costly process of procuring additional WAN capacity.

Network Sequence Caching

Network Sequence Caching is the patent-pending sequence caching technique in the WXC platforms. The Sequence Caching feature, like MSR compression, identifies patterns at the IP layer and replaces them with a label for transmission across the WAN. But unlike MSR, which operates entirely in memory, Sequence Caching uses hard drives to retain and recognize these patterns. Sequence Caching focuses on larger patterns than MSR and is able to detect these patterns even when they are separated by hundreds of gigabytes of other data and have occurred days or weeks earlier.

Because Sequence Caching technology accumulates a vast knowledge base, it remembers that it has "seen" a particular traffic sequence earlier and prevents transmission of these repeated patterns across the WAN. These patterns could be anywhere from a few bytes in size up to the entire object, consisting of a series of packets across the WAN. In this manner, any repeated sequence of data, whether it is a small region within a file or the entire file itself, is eliminated from the WAN traffic and delivered to the end user as if it were locally generated on the user's LAN.

Since Sequence Caching operates at the IP layer on the actual sequence of bytes transmitted across the WAN, it never needs to maintain object boundaries or manage content at the application layer. As a result, all content is, by definition, guaranteed to be consistent and fresh since all content bytes are actually generated by the server and then optimized across the WAN by Sequence Caching. Sequence Caching therefore does not require any form of content management and instead automatically detects and mirrors all repeated content at the byte level close to the end user.

Unlike file or web caching, the Sequence Caching technique is also highly effective on dynamic content. Since the patterns that Sequence Caching detects and optimizes are byte sequences of variable length, they have no dependency on the objects, file sizes, names, URLs, tags, or other constructs. Hence, if an object or file is changed numerous times and accessed again across the WAN, only the changed regions are transmitted across the WAN - the unchanged regions are delivered to the user from the local WXC device.

Packet Flow Acceleration (TCP Acceleration)

The WX Packet Flow Acceleration (PFA) technologies accelerate TCP's performance over the WAN.

PFA includes:

• Fast Connection Setup - Improves the performance of short-lived connections by eliminating one round-trip time from the TCP connection setup, speeding up applications such as HTTP.
• Active Flow Pipelining - Extends the TCP performance improvements by terminating the TCP connections locally and using a more efficient transport protocol between WX and WXC platforms. This feature significantly benefits application performance on high-bandwidth or high-latency connections.
• Forward Error Correction - Limits the need for retransmissions on lossy networks. It uses recovery packets, sent alongside data packets, for indexing to allow for reconstruction of lost packets.

Application Flow Acceleration (Application-Specific Acceleration)

Application Flow Acceleration (AppFlow) technology transparently speeds the performance of key applications that are especially impacted by WAN latency.

The AppFlow technology accelerates three specific protocols: the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) used by Microsoft Exchange; the Common Internet File System (CIFS) at the basis of Microsoft file services; and HTTP for web applications.

In the case of Exchange and file services, their underlying protocols send data in small blocks and require an acknowledgement for each, resulting in hundreds or even thousands of round trip times (RTTs) to complete a single transaction. As a result, performance drops dramatically when used across a WAN link with even modest latency-20 ms or 30 ms-resulting in user frustration and lower productivity. For web applications, HTTP requests objects one at a time, so dozens of RTTs are needed to load a single web page, again impacting user productivity.

The AppFlow technology accelerates these applications by pipelining the data blocks and web objects, sending as many in quick succession as needed to fill the available WAN capacity. As a result, the AppFlow technology delivers a three- to 100-fold improvement in application performance.

AppFlow includes:

• Exchange Acceleration (MAPI) - For remote Outlook users accessing centralized Exchange servers, the AppFlow technology greatly improves response times by downloading the full message across the WAN before the user requests each portion of it. The AppFlow technology can then ensure that the entire e-mail and its attachments can be sent to the user at LAN speeds, accelerating Exchange performance and streamlining a serial and highly inefficient bulk transfer.
• Microsoft File Services Acceleration (CIFS) - Similar to MAPI, the CIFS protocol-the most common method for opening and transferring files-sends data serially and in small blocks. The AppFlow technology accelerates CIFS transmissions over WAN links by requesting the file's data blocks in advance of the user's request, accelerating and improving performance of remote file services.
• Web Acceleration (HTTP) - A typical web page includes dozens of separate objects, each of which is requested serially, one at a time. Consequently, building a web page takes at least as many round trips as there are objects on the page. To speed web page downloads to branch offices, the AppFlow technology "learns" the objects associated with a specific URL and pipelines them across the link, making them available locally when they are requested the next time.

Quality of Service (Bandwidth Management)

Bandwidth management includes both Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities and bandwidth allocation to allow IT to prioritize business-critical and latency-sensitive applications.

The WX and WXC platforms defy the cliché that effective QoS must be difficult to implement-the intuitive wizard/template-based approach enables IT to easily ensure that business policies are met through QoS techniques.

IT can assign priority status and bandwidth-allocation metrics to applications. The WX and WXC platforms allow IT to classify traffic by looking not just at IP header or ToS/DiffServ information but also inside the data payload to act on Layer 7 application information. For example, at Layer 3, all Citrix applications look the same, so IT needs Layer 7 information to discern SAP traffic from a print job.

Further, Juniper Networks recognizes that its WX and WXC platforms are not the only QoS-aware devices in the network. The WX QoS techniques preserve and allow visibility into the QoS markings that other devices apply. For example, WX and WXC platforms devices can preserve an enterprise-based QoS marking, map that QoS policy to an MPLS-based service level for transmission through a service provider's network, and then restore the enterprise-based marking in the remote location.

Because the WX and WXC platforms know both the local WAN link speed as well as all the remote WX and WXC link speeds, IT can perform resource allocation accurately, maximizing a link resource without overrunning either WX or WXC platforms. The WX and WXC system software also supports a variety of queuing options for prioritizing access to the WAN link.

Policy-Based Multipath (Path Optimization)

The Policy-Based Multipath capability enables companies to take advantage of emerging WAN services based on Internet transport with the assurance that key performance metrics will still be met.

IT managers have traditionally relied on proven and predictable leased line or frame relay services to interconnect locations. That sense of security, however, has a price-limited bandwidth, high recurring costs, and long inflexible circuit provisioning cycles. New services such as DSL offer robust bandwidth, attractive pricing, and quick provisioning, but reliability issues have slowed adoption for critical business applications. With the Multipath feature, IT can safely exploit low-cost options such as DSL while continuing to leverage legacy private WANs.

In a location served by two WAN links, IT can use the Multipath capability to define which applications should traverse which link. The system software monitors the performance of each path and automatically diverts applications from one path to the other if performance no longer meets acceptable levels.

The Multipath capability demonstrates the integrated nature of the WX Framework. For example, when Multipath diverts traffic from one link to another, QoS policies ensure that applications already flowing over the second link are not negatively impacted.

Visibility and Reporting

To fully optimize the WAN and improve application performance, IT must first understand what applications are traversing the WAN, how much bandwidth they're consuming, and how congestion is impacting performance. This kind of information is critical not only for the day-to-day running of the WAN but also for providing service-level management throughout the enterprise.

The WX and WXC platforms provide two main software tools for gaining visibility into the WAN. The WebView software is built into each product and supports per-device configuration, management, and monitoring capabilities. The WX Central Management System (CMS) software provides an aggregated view across all deployed WX and WXC platforms. This kind of enterprisewide visibility enables IT to gauge application performance, site metrics, and traffic patterns for long-term planning as well as troubleshooting and analysis.

Benefits

The WX and WXC platforms enable organizations to realize a range of business and technical benefits. With these application acceleration devices, enterprises can:

• increase bandwidth,
• gain visibility,
• reduce costs, and
• consolidate servers.

Increase Bandwidth

Enterprise businesses of all kinds struggle to balance the competing demands of cost containment and increased network traffic. Since WAN costs typically account for IT's highest expenditure after headcount, most enterprises do not have the luxury of simply adding more WAN capacity to their networks.

What accounts for the rise in bandwidth demands?

• Web-enabled applications. These architectures typically increase bandwidth tenfold compared to client-server architectures performing the same transaction.
   
• Broader proliferation of applications.In the past, fewer workers within a business accessed any given application, while today many more employees across many more sites need access to the same application.
   
• Global integration. While businesses used to tolerate a delay in receiving information from far-flung locations, most enterprises today demand that even the most remote sites be tightly integrated into the business processes.
   
• Richer content. E-mail and other communications used to be text only, but today's workers think nothing of attaching 5 MB PowerPoint files and extensive Excel spreadsheets to their messages.
   
• Increased interaction with voice and video. While networks used to serve up data-only files, more businesses now use their WAN links to carry critical voice and video communications.
   

The Solution

Juniper Networks is focused on optimizing the WAN to improve application performance - increasing the available bandwidth across a link is part of that solution. The WX and WXC application acceleration platforms include reduction techniques to enable greater throughput over the WAN. The company's Molecular Sequence Reduction (MSR) technique, available on the WX and WXC platforms, stores patterns in memory and, when it sees a repeated pattern, sends a simple flag across the WAN rather than the full data pattern, reducing WAN traffic by 50 to 80 percent.

The WXC platforms support a second reduction technique, Network Sequence Caching, which augments MSR compression with hard-disk-based pattern storage. The Sequence Caching techniquestores longer data patterns and stores them for a longer period of time. This approach allows the WXC platforms to eliminate redundancies even when a file has been modified or when it was last seen weeks previously. The Sequence Caching technique provides compression results as high as 80 percent to 98 percent.

With WX and WXC platforms, IT can cost-effectively increase the available bandwidth on their existing WAN links.

Gain Visibility

WANs have traditionally proven hard to monitor. They don't provide an easy place for instrumentation, and IT departments can rarely cost-justify the purchase of probes and other monitoring devices.

But it's crucial for a business to understand what's traversing the WAN. Key functions such as troubleshooting and network planning rely on an understanding of WAN traffic. Among the parameters that enterprises need to monitor are:

• Application performance. IT must have an at-a-glance view of how key applications are performing across the WAN and whether additional optimization is required.
   
• Application mix. Businesses need to know what traffic is running across the WAN and to which sites.
   
• Top talkers. Seeing which users, applications, or sites are consuming the available WAN capacity is critical to troubleshooting, forming a QoS policy, and performing capacity planning.
   
• The impact of QoS. When QoS is invoked, the WAN is throttling one application in favor of another, and IT must understand how that restricted application is performing.
   
• Packet size distribution. This information is critical to detecting anomalies and understanding bandwidth consumption.
   
• Control logs. Without this kind of data, IT cannot tune the WAN settings.
   

The Solution

WX and WXC application acceleration platforms support a broad range of visibility and control mechanisms to make the WAN a much better managed entity. Because the WX and WXC platforms typically reside on both ends of a WAN link, IT gains complete visibility into those links and can see summary or detailed information across a pervasive WAN acceleration deployment.

The WX and WXC platforms provide extensive reporting-both on a device level in WebView, which is built into the platforms, and across a system of WX and WXC platforms through the WX Central Management System (CMS) software. More than any other single feature of the WX Framework, WX CMS is tightly woven into every other feature, providing IT with aggregated reporting of WAN and application performance and control over the parameters that affect business policies.

The software helps IT learn the mix of applications running over the WAN and how much bandwidth they're consuming, which users are consuming the greatest amount of bandwidth, and how QoS is affecting application throughput. These top talker and other reports help IT quickly pinpoint anomalies in the network, identify whether the WAN is the culprit during application performance problems, and troubleshoot problems that have historically been tough to diagnose given the lack of WAN insight.

WX CMS also highlights the benefits of each element of the WX Framework. It enables IT to manage additional WAN capacity enabled by compression, view application acceleration results, allocate bandwidth and prioritize applications, and direct applications over different WAN links. IT staff can customize the mix of reports they view by designing personal "My WAN" portals.

With WX and WXC platforms, IT can gain the complete WAN visibility needed to simplify troubleshooting and perform long-term planning.

Reduce Costs

Despite the improving business climate in most enterprises, IT is still pressed to produce economic efficiencies and cost savings. This requirement-in direct conflict with IT's mandate to provide greater services to a growing user population-means IT has to make better use of existing resources rather than increase them.

Enterprise IT organizations continue to find innovative and creative approaches to cost reduction. To save money, these businesses can:

• Avoid or delay WAN upgrades. With WAN costs being the second-highest IT expense after staffing, WAN optimization can have a significant payback, often with an ROI of less than nine months.
   
• Improve application response times. By improving people's access to critical data and shortening the time needed to perform key tasks, IT can improve the business' core productivity and contribute to the bottom line.
   
• Centralize or consolidate remote servers. The operational and capital costs associated with managing remote servers is very high, so reducing the requirement for those remote platforms can save significant funds.
   
• Improve troubleshooting ability. The quicker IT can solve a problem, the more time the team has for advanced planning and other value-added tasks.
   

The Solution

The WX and WXC application acceleration platforms provide a number of hard- and soft-dollar savings to IT organizations. Where WX and WXC platforms enable a business to avoid a WAN upgrade in support of a new application, for example, the ROI can be as short as four to six months. For enterprises where bandwidth savings are not the attraction, productivity gains the WX and WXC platforms provide in the form of application acceleration can contribute to improving the bottom line.

For some businesses, regulatory issues or cost concerns drive the need for server consolidation. The performance gains enabled by the WX and WXC platforms ensure that remote users get the application response times and throughput they need to perform their jobs, even when they're accessing resources across the WAN. Ultimately, the additional WAN visibility provided by the WX and WXC platforms reduce troubleshooting time for IT staff, enabling them to spend more time on long-range network planning and design.

With WX and WXC platforms, IT can finally provide both improved network services and lower costs to the business.

Consolidate Servers

Poor application performance across the WAN has driven the deployment of remote servers to provide e-mail and other critical file services in remote offices. While users enjoy the improved application response times that local servers provide, these remote servers create a range of IT problems. Chief among the issues are:

• Regulatory compliance. More enterprises have determined that centralizing key data, such as e-mail records, is essential to adhering to regulatory demands.
   
• Backup of key data. Relying on non-IT staff in branch offices to perform critical backup functions, such as nightly tape backups, has proven unreliable.
   
• Patch and other software updates. Maintaining current software revisions and patch updates on a range of disparate remote servers is cumbersome, costly, and time-consuming.
   
• Troubleshooting. Diagnosing and solving problems on remote devices takes more time and slows system recovery.
   

Server consolidation has its obvious benefits, and the move toward it is clearly underway, but IT organizations embarking on such a project must ensure that remote users will retain key application functionality. The fundamental WAN characteristics that slow application performance over WAN links haven't changed, so IT must address those limitations to ensure acceptable application performance when remote users access centralized servers.

The Solution

The WX and WXC application acceleration platforms help maintain application performance as users in remote offices access file and other servers in centralized locations. The company provides a suite of integrated features in its WX Framework to enhance application performance.

First, MSR compression and Sequence Caching store repeated data patterns and replace them with flags for transmission across the WAN. As a result, data takes much less time to traverse the WAN.

Most importantly, the WX and WXC platforms provide application acceleration to speed response times for users. The company's Packet Flow Acceleration (PFA) technologies provide broad-based TCP acceleration, which increases application throughput by reducing the impact of latency on any TCP-based application. More dramatically, the WX and WXC platforms support Application Flow Acceleration (AppFlow) techniques that speed Exchange, Microsoft file services, and web applications. These techniques overcome the protocol constraints that limit the throughput of those applications, enabling the WX and WXC platforms to pipeline large data blocks or multiple web objects across the WAN at one time. As a result, users see anywhere from 2x to 3x performance gains on web to as high as 30x to 50x gains on Exchange and file services.

Finally, IT can improve application performance for remote users by applying the QoS and other bandwidth-management features. These easy-to-use, template-based tools let IT define QoS policies in simple wizards, making it quick and easy to apply application prioritization policies across the enterprise.

With WX and WXC platforms to accelerate applications, server consolidation can make for happy IT and happy users.