As companies are looking to cut costs, many ponder moving their infrastructure to a managed hosting environment rather than maintaining it themselves. Saving money is always an appealing option to any CEO, but the first questions always raised are, “How will our infrastructure respond if it is a hundred of miles away? Will our file sharing performance be hurt due it not being on the local LAN?”
These are all very good concerns and, in some cases, can be deal breakers for the company. But, there is help out there, and the solution is proven and being praised by many. That solution is Cisco WAAS.
Cisco WAAS, or Wide Area Application Services, allows you to centralize applications and storage in a managed host, while still maintaining LAN-like performance. And that is just the start of things!
WAAS allows you to:
Save money by not having to have dedicated floor space locally for a data center.
Not have data across many servers in many locations that is different everywhere.
More efficiently use WAN connections, and prevent unnecessary upgrades to those circuits.
Have the uptime and reliability for their servers that come with a Managed host, and not have to worry about issues like failures, MRO stock, support contracts etc.
Implementing WAAS is pretty straightforward. Depending on your exact needs, there are different models and implementation details, from a local module on an ISR router, to a full-fledged dedicated device. Here is how Cisco WAAS works the magic:
