"Performance was so poor prior to Certeon that the engineering group was ready to abandon our remote branch implementation, but Certeon's Secure Acceleration Technology dramatically reduced
network latencies, improved end-to-end security, and turned an unusable solution into an excellent one."
Derek Dunn, Global IT Architect, St. Jude Medical
Certeon's next generation S-Series Application Acceleration Appliance is based on its patent pending Secure Acceleration Technology™ (SAT) and is the only solution that can meet the complete application delivery speed, security, and scalability needs of the globally distributed enterprise. SAT enables the S-Series appliances to use application whole object compression and optimization techniques to securely accelerate HTTP and HTTPS traffic over a WAN.
SAT is made up of two core components:
Certeon S-Series appliances with embedded Application Acceleration Blueprints and Object Differencing Engine reduce the amount of data traffic going over the network as well as the transmission time, which significantly improves application response time and application delivery over a WAN.
For more information on Certeon's S-Series with its Secure Application Technology, register for our whitepaper: Certeon S-Series Technical Architecture.
Certeon's next generation Application Acceleration Blueprints enable the S-Series appliances to understand the object and messaging semantics of applications and use this knowledge to significantly improve application responsiveness and minimize traffic and chatter over the WAN. Operating at Layer 7 - the Application Layer of the OSI model - the Application Acceleration Blueprints are uniquely able to understand application interactions and identify application data objects in transit without modification to the application. The S-Series appliances can then pre-fetch application data and perform object differencing to quickly transmit new application information. The result is an unprecedented reduction in application data going over the network and application response times.
Certeon has released specific Application Acceleration Blueprints to accelerate the S-Series' application delivery capabilities for a variety of applications, including standard HTTP and HTTPS traffic, Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, Microsoft Office System, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Wide Area File Services (WAFS).
To find out more about Certeon's application acceleration solutions go to Solutions.
The ODE provides both a high-performance object store and an object difference and compress engine within the S-Series appliances. The disk-based object store uses a proprietary caching algorithm that optimizes I/O performance for changing objects, enabling a single disk access to read and write an entire object of any size delivering sustained high-throughput disk I/O. In addition, efficient object management enables a large number of objects to be concurrently available in the system for difference and compress operations. This means a large number of users and applications can be supported by the S-Series for acceleration.
The core of the ODE is the high-speed, single-pass difference and compress engine. Various algorithms are used to provide the best data reduction results based on different object types and their data content while maintaining high throughput and performance. In addition, some object types, such as those that are already compressed (e.g., GZIP), including OpenXML file formats in Office 2007, require data transformation prior to differencing and compression. The S-Series is the only application accelerator that can optimize compressed GZIP files, whereas traditional WAN compression or network optimization techniques cannot.
The ODE and the Application Acceleration Blueprints provide the maximum reduction in response time for application delivery in the industry - an improvement of over 90%.
Certeon's innovative Application Acceleration Blueprints and ODE enables the S-Series to deliver truly impressive levels of response time reduction and acceleration to all HTTP/HTTPS applications and collaborative and portal platforms such as, Microsoft Office and SharePoint applications. The Application Acceleration Blueprints identify application-specific data objects in the network traffic flow between the application client and server, and the ODE transforms and tracks these objects over time to reduce data and round-trips over a WAN. With fewer bytes to transmit, an application can respond faster once a transmission is complete. The benefits of data reduction especially apply during peak demand times, when application response times can be slowed significantly even when network links are seemingly underutilized. The result of the ODE and the Application Acceleration Blueprints is over 90% reduction in response times for application access for remote office users. In the near future, Certeon will be offering additional Application Acceleration Blueprints for the S-Series to accelerate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Wide Area File Access (WAFS) solutions.
Certeon's Application Acceleration Blueprints and ODE work in combination with other WAN optimization techniques for significantly reducing WAN data flow and effectively compressing data. The WAN optimization techniques used by the S-Series include, but are not limited to the following methods:
History-Based Packet Compression
Packet compression provides a good basic level of acceleration for all traffic that is not HTTP accelerated. In addition to a non-history-based compression for "other" flows, whereby each packet is compressed using the DEFLATE algorithm, the S-Series includes a proprietary history-based packet compression algorithm and history synchronization protocol in the event that packets get lost or are reordered. History-based packet compression takes advantage of differencing data from previous packets to achieve even greater data reduction.
Secure Application Acceleration
Certeon is the first solution to securely accelerate all HTTPS traffic. Today, SSL usage is 27% of all traffic and is increasing at 25% per year. With SSL, each client-to-server session is encrypted and secure from eavesdropping and tampering. Since SAT enables the S-Series appliances to work at the application layer, they can accelerate SSL traffic while maintaining end-to-end security from the data center server to the desktop. SAT does this by managing client SSL sessions locally, in the branch office, without compromising session security or the integrity or manageability of the enterprise's key management infrastructure. This allows the S-Series to apply its full suite of application acceleration technology to traffic flowing between clients and servers, as well as to traffic utilizing SSL or HTTPS. In addition, the S-Series also encrypts all of the data stored on its disk using standard encryption protocols.
Quality of Service (QoS) and Traffic Shaping
The S-Series ensures that mission-critical information is prioritized and receives the bandwidth it requires. Traffic is categorized based on application, IP address, and/or port number, and is optimally accelerated, queued, and marked for interoperability with router QoS and MPLS. Traffic shaping uses the Hierarchical Token Bucket algorithm, in which each QoS priority has a configurable committed rate, peer connections have pro rata committed rates, and flows can borrow from underutilized flows up to the ceiling rate supported by the WAN link.
Forward Error Correction (FEC)
The S-Series can correct for varying levels of packet loss over the WAN without the need for packet retransmission. This improves traffic throughput and application performance over global networks, which often suffer from high packet loss and latency.
Patented Technology
Certeon has several patents pending on its Secure Acceleration Technology. These unique inventions enable its S-Series appliances to deliver application intelligence to the network to reduce application response times and application delivery unlike any other application optimization solution.
Packet Aggregation
Some network devices are packet rate-limited which may be problematic when chatty applications generate a high rate of small packets which then throttle all traffic traversing these packet rate-limited devices. The S-Series can be configured to allow smaller network packets entering an IPsec tunnel to be aggregated to make one larger packet, improving WAN bandwidth efficiency.
Efficient Web Page Rendering
The S-Series' Private Cache Acceleration (PCA) feature helps accelerate small objects typically encountered in web pages for which refresh requests are frequent. Certeon optimizes the handling of small object content by greatly reducing the occurrence of content freshness checking that transpires over the WAN, improving download times over high latency links.
