Application Acceleration Blueprints

Certain legacy application protocols, such as CIFS for file sharing or MAPI for mail, were not designed to run over a WAN. The result is that even with compression and de-duplication the performance of these applications is still poor. The reason is that these protocols so not stream the transfer the data, instead they break it up into chucks and wait for the chunk to be received before sending the next one. This is known as “Chattiness”. Chattiness is a problem that cannot be overcome by adding additional bandwidth; it requires application level intelligence to optimize.

The Certeon aCelera Application Acceleration Blueprints optimize the application protocols so that they can operate efficiently across the WAN. They use techniques such as local acknowledgements of requests, request pipelining, pre-fetching data and combining multiple requests together. The result is significant acceleration of the applications. The Application Acceleration Blueprints also provide the application intelligence to the de-duplication engine to enable the Content Aware De-duplication.

The Certeon aCelera includes the following Application Acceleration Blueprints:

• HTTP – The HTTP Blueprint is able to identify both static and dynamic web content and pass that information to the compressor so that it can optimally provide the greatest data reduction. Additional optimizations greatly benefit applications like SharePoint, these include the ability to respond locally to 304 Not Modified requests and optimize authentication requests further reducing the number of round trips and latency.
• SSL – Certeon’s SSL Blueprint allows for the acceleration of encrypted flows used either for tunneling SSL or by applications that use HTTPS. The SSL Blueprints uses a patented technology that ensures the security trust model is not broken, guaranteeing that the server certificates never leave the data center.
• CIFS – The CIFS Blueprint uses multiple techniques including read-ahead, write-behind and directory optimizations. These significantly help optimize the usage of CIFS whether it’s a file download, upload, directory scan or file scan.
• MAPI – The MAPI Blueprint automatically detects MAPI connections and responds by pipelining multiple MAPI messages together for transport across the WAN. By eliminating protocol chattiness, aCelera makes Outlook/Exchange significantly faster over high latency connections. This in particular benefits the transfer of attachments which can see download time reduction and bandwidth savings of greater than 90%.
• Outlook Anywhere – In order to avoid connecting VPNs to access email, Microsoft recommends Outlook Anywhere. This tunnels MAPI/RPC over HTTP(S). The Outlook Anywhere Blueprints is able to identify Outlook traffic being tunneled and automatically apply the SSL, MAPI and HTTP Blueprints technologies.
• iSCSI – The iSCSI Blueprint is able to parse the block level SCSI data and separate it from the SCSI operations to perform pipelining and ensure that the compressor is able to provide the highest level of data reduction.