WAN Accelerator

You may wish to investigate Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) Appliances.

Provide high-performance access to applications, storage, and content across your WAN using the Cisco Wide-Area Application Engine (WAE) portfolio of scalable, low-cost network appliances.

Brad Reese BradReese.Com - Cisco Repair

I really wouldn't limit yourself to the Cisco product range for WAN acceleration. There are a lot of other vendors which have been in this market space for a long time and have far more experience in this field.

Ulitmately, with WAN acceleration, you should evaluate several products in a lab environment and if possible, using your real data.

I have worked with Junipers WX platform (formerly Peribit), Expand and Riverbed. I have also heard really good things about Tacit (recently aquired by Packeteer).

James

As discussed you should evaluate in your environment with something like nistnet (freeware) to create bandwidth limitations AND latency. I have seen Tacit and it works pretty nicely for file shares. If you are doing MS office (Word, Excel, whatever) file opens saves, etc then it is nice. There are I suspect issues with Access databases for example.

Many of these vendors will give you a 1 month trial against a purchase order (or even without).

We got a free trial from Tacit and went with them. There are a lot of articles on the web.

I have the idea that Riverbed look very strong but they wouldn't give us a free trial (without a PO) and we had already done a lot of work with Tacit and the business were demanding a solution.

We get the occasional problem but it's a LOT better than not having it.

Our issue is latency not bandwidth.

Cisco have a set of test macros that might help. I now forget what they do exactly. IIRC when Tacit found out that I was using Cisco tools on their kit they whipped out their own tools and left me to play with them too.

Oh yes, Cisco have a pre-built nistnet CD. I had already got nistnet working so I didn't use it.

I couldn't say enough good things about the Riverbed products. We use them here at work.