Branch-in-a-Box

As IT departments struggle to make their infrastructure agile to support new business requirements and to lower costs, the trend has been to have servers migrate from branch offices to be consolidated in the data center. The remote office has a smaller IT footprint and is both simpler and more cost effective to manage. However server consolidation has created a new problem; as users access their data across WAN links application performance has suffered. WAN optimization solutions like the Certeon aCelera family of virtual appliances in these environments are becoming a necessity to ensure that user productivity does not suffer.

Traditional appliances that are hardware based solutions require that equipment be sited, managed, and accommodated and add additional costs. A software based solution like the Certeon aCelera Virtual Appliance frees you from these concerns. The aCelera Virtual Appliance is the only WAN Optimization product to support all three leading virtualization hypervisors: VMware ESX(i), Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer and provides a clear path to deployments in the cloud. aCelera gives an enterprise the flexibility to choose the industry standard virtualization platform of their choice. An aCelera WAN optimization service can be run as a network service on the same server that you run Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, and other standard services providing a Branch-in-a-Box solution.

While some WAN optimization vendors have chosen to add a virtualization platform to their hardware appliance, the advantages of deploying software on an industry standard virtualization platform are manifold. Those advantages include:

• Not be limited by the virtual machines that the WAN optimization vendor has certified
• The ability to convert existing servers to virtual machines even using the same hardware
• Deployment of a WAN optimization on enterprise standard equipment
• The ability to use industry standard virtualization management and monitoring tools
• The application of advanced virtualization platform features like High Availability or Live Migration to simplify systems management

The aCelera family of virtual appliances can help support a simplified branch office infrastructure while reducing WAN bandwidth usage, increasing application performance, and improving end user productivity.