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Products & Services WAAS

Improve Your WAN Optimise performance of TCP-based applications across your WAN with Cisco WAAS, which combines application acceleration technologies with WAN optimisation techniques.

The WAAS solution allows you to:

  • Deploy centralised applications confidently
  • Consolidate costly branch office servers and storage into data centres
  • Offer LAN-like performance to remote users

How it works

Unlike other WAN optimisation solutions, WAAS integrates transparently with the network, preserving TCP information to maintain functions such as security, QoS, visibility and monitoring. WAAS is easy to deploy and manage and integrates with Cisco IOS software.

To accelerate application and file performance and to reduce WAN bandwidth usage, Cisco WAAS incorporates application acceleration and WAN optimisation techniques, including compression, redundancy elimination, transport optimisations, caching and content distribution. These techniques help overcome the bandwidth, throughput and latency limitations associated with TCP/IP and application protocols.

Cisco WAAS achieves superior results over alternative offerings by applying optimisation at three separate layers:

  1. Latency and bandwidth reduction at Layer 7, using application-specific optimisations that suppress unnecessary messages, perform message and operation batching and employ sophisticated caching techniques to minimise data transfers across the WAN
  2. Bandwidth and throughput improvement at Layer 4, using techniques such as Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE), LZ Compression and Transport Flow Optimisation (TFO) based on extended TCP standards
  3. Transparent network integration at Layers 3 and 4, allowing WAAS to take advantage of traffic classification, QoS, policy-based routing, high availability, load balancing and other network policies.