Wide area file services (WAFS) products allow remote office users to access and share files globally at LAN speeds over the WAN. Distributed enterprises that deploy WAFS solutions are able to consolidate storage to corporate datacenters, eliminating the need to back up and manage data that previously resided in their remote offices. WAFS uses techniques such as SMB and MAPI protocol optimization, data compression, and sometimes storing recurrent data patterns in a local cache.
WAFS is a subset of WAN optimization, which also caches SSL Intranet as well as dynamic web page content and multimedia traffic generated by educational technology, to accelerate a greater percentage of WAN traffic.
The term was coined by Brad O'Neill of the analyst firm Taneja Group in a May 2004 article for InfoStor magazine.[ citation needed ]
Traffic shaping is a bandwidth management technique used on computer networks which delays some or all datagrams to bring them into compliance with a desired traffic profile. Traffic shaping is used to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, or increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds. It is often confused with traffic policing, the distinct but related practice of packet dropping and packet marking.
Server Message Block (SMB) is a communication protocol originally developed in 1983 by Barry A. Feigenbaum at IBM and intended to provide shared access to files and printers across nodes on a network of systems running IBM's OS/2. It also provides an authenticated inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism. In 1987, Microsoft and 3Com implemented SMB in LAN Manager for OS/2, at which time SMB used the NetBIOS service atop the NetBIOS Frames protocol as its underlying transport. Later, Microsoft implemented SMB in Windows NT 3.1 and has been updating it ever since, adapting it to work with newer underlying transports: TCP/IP and NetBT. SMB implementation consists of two vaguely named Windows services: "Server" and "Workstation". It uses NTLM or Kerberos protocols for user authentication.
A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. CDNs came into existence in the late 1990s as a means for alleviating the performance bottlenecks of the Internet as the Internet was starting to become a mission-critical medium for people and enterprises. Since then, CDNs have grown to serve a large portion of the Internet content today, including web objects, downloadable objects, applications, live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media sites.
The Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) is a proprietary file system that supports large, high-performance RAID arrays, quick restarts without lengthy consistency checks in the event of a crash or power failure, and growing the filesystems size quickly. It was designed by NetApp for use in its storage appliances like NetApp FAS, AFF, Cloud Volumes ONTAP and ONTAP Select.
DNS spoofing, also referred to as DNS cache poisoning, is a form of computer security hacking in which corrupt Domain Name System data is introduced into the DNS resolver's cache, causing the name server to return an incorrect result record, e.g. an IP address. This results in traffic being diverted to the attacker's computer.
The IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is a block storage virtualization appliance that belongs to the IBM System Storage product family. SVC implements an indirection, or "virtualization", layer in a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN).
WAN optimization is a collection of techniques for improving data transfer across wide area networks (WANs). In 2008, the WAN optimization market was estimated to be $1 billion, and was to grow to $4.4 billion by 2014 according to Gartner, a technology research firm. In 2015 Gartner estimated the WAN optimization market to be a $1.1 billion market.
Packeteer, Inc., founded in 1996 by Robert Packer, Brett Galloway and Bob Luxenberg was an I.T. company based in Cupertino, California that was listed on the NASDAQ. Networking appliances focus on Application Traffic Management and optimization for wide area networks. They held at least 40 patents for various network optimization methods. Packeteer was acquired by Blue Coat Systems in 2008.
An application delivery network (ADN) is a suite of technologies that, when deployed together, provide availability, security, visibility, and acceleration for Internet applications such as websites. ADN components provide supporting functionality that enables website content to be delivered to visitors and other users of that website, in a fast, secure, and reliable way.
Remote Differential Compression (RDC) is a client–server synchronization algorithm that allows the contents of two files to be synchronized by communicating only the differences between them. It was introduced with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2, is included with later Windows client and server operating systems, but by 2019 is not being developed and is not used by any Microsoft product.
Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is technology developed by Cisco Systems that optimizes the performance of any TCP-based application operating in a wide area network (WAN) environment while preserving and strengthening branch security. WAAS combines WAN optimization, acceleration of TCP-based applications, and Cisco's Wide Area File Services (WAFS) in a single appliance or blade. It is Cisco's attempt to keep WAN optimization residing firmly in the router, eliminating the need to deploy acceleration appliances throughout the infrastructure. The technology preserves TCP information within the network while offering the performance benefits that come along with using WAN optimization technology.
A roaming user profile is a file synchronization concept in the Windows NT family of operating systems that allows users with a computer joined to a Windows domain to log on to any computer on the same domain and access their documents and have a consistent desktop experience, such as applications remembering toolbar positions and preferences, or the desktop appearance staying the same, while keeping all related files stored locally, to not continuously depend on a fast and reliable network connection to a file server.
Geo-replication systems are designed to provide improved availability and disaster tolerance by using geographically distributed data centers. This is intended to improve the response time for applications such as web portals. Geo-replication can be achieved using software, hardware or a combination of the two.
Mobiliti was a file synchronization, backup and offline network software for Microsoft Windows based systems, developed by Packeteer. It was originally called Network/Unplugged when it was released in 1998 by Mobiliti, Inc. It started as a 3-member team of Kiran Somalwar, Dinesh Sinha and Ram Kishore Dulam. Mobiliti was acquired by Tacit Networks, Inc., which in turn was acquired by Packeteer, Inc. in 2006. Packeteer was in turn acquired by Blue Coat Systems. As of 16 July 2008 Blue Coat no longer offers Mobiliti for sale but support may still be purchased and existing support continues until 16 July 2011.
Exinda is a company that provides computer networking hardware for improving the performance of wide area networks (WANs), known as WAN optimization.
Blue Coat Systems, Inc., was a company that provided hardware, software, and services designed for cybersecurity and network management. In 2016, it was acquired by and folded into Symantec. In 2019 was, as part of Symantec Enterprise division, sold to Broadcom.
Web performance refers to the speed in which web pages are downloaded and displayed on the user's web browser. Web performance optimization (WPO), or website optimization is the field of knowledge about increasing web performance.
Google PageSpeed is a family of tools by Google Inc, designed to help a website's performance optimizations. It was introduced at Developer Conference in 2010. There are four main components of PageSpeed family tools: PageSpeed Module, consisting of mod PageSpeed for the Apache HTTP Server and ngx PageSpeed for the Nginx, PageSpeed Insights, PageSpeed Service, and PageSpeed Chrome DevTools extension. All of these components are built to identify faults in a website's compliance with Google's Web Performance Best Practices, as well as automate the adjustment process.
Array Networks is an American networking hardware company. It sells network traffic encryption tools.
A software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is a wide area network that uses software-defined network technology, such as communicating over the Internet using overlay tunnels which are encrypted when destined for internal organization locations.