Datasheet

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Challenges
Herein lies the dilemma. While resource consolidation can help you achieve your cost-
cutting goals, it often does so at the expense of application performance by placing more
pressure on existing data center and WAN resources.
For instance, while Web-enabled applications reduce client software support costs, they
also create a capacity crunch on the WAN, since Web-based applications are nowhere near
as bandwidth-efficient as their client/server counterparts. Buying more bandwidth is an
option, but that will drive up costs and won’t fix all of your problems. The distance between
the data center and remote and branch-office users imposes application-killing latency—a
fact that all the bandwidth in the world can’t overcome. Any global business that has
extended its centralized business applications to distributed branch office and remote users
has learned that latency is the number one cause of poor application performance.
Regulatory compliance adds another dimension to the challenge. Making sure that
email, files, and other data are retained isn’t easy, given the disparate devices currently
installed at far-flung locations. In short, you’re faced with a compliance and application
performance challenge that requires a strategic, proven, and straightforward solution,
one that gives remote and branch office users the same response times they get from
local servers. You also deserve a set of tools that provide a holistic view of the distributed
enterprise and the applications running over it. Your WAN services and application
licenses cost a lot of money, so understanding exactly how these strategic assets are
performing is absolutely critical.
Trends
A number of trends and environmental changes threaten to transform the distributed
enterprise from a strategic asset into a potential liability. These trends and changes are
legitimate responses to evolving business needs. And because they have occurred over
time, they have resulted in a patchwork of solutions that have added complexity to the
environment.
Globalization and Distributed Applications
To remain competitive in an increasingly global business environment, organizations have
established branch offices in locations around the world. In order to give their branch
office staffs the same level of application performance as corporate headquarters,
companies have created mini data centers at each branch, deploying application, file, and
email servers at these remote sites.
While this resource proliferation gets the job done, it also has several serious drawbacks.
• It drives up capital costs, because the only way to keep pace with corporate expansion
is to buy and deploy servers on an as-needed basis, making it impossible to leverage
economies of scale.
• Deploying equipment at remote locations requires IT personnel for maintenance and
support, increasing headcount and adding operational costs.
• Deploying applications in this distributed manner makes end-to-end management,
backup, and recovery virtually impossible. A lack of visibility into remote locations also
makes troubleshooting and problem resolution more difficult, affecting both availability
and productivity.
• Security is also an issue; as device counts climb, so does the potential for a security
breach.