IT wide-area networking - whooshing up the wan

The wide-area network (WAN) has become increasingly exposed as a major impediment to overall application performance by trends such as globalisation, Web-enablement of applications, and server virtualisation.The result has been a boom in tools that mitigate the WAN's defects. The problem is not so much lack of bandwidth, it is latency. WAN optimisation tools and appliances attempt to mitigate latency in various ways including caching, software replication, and data blocking or prioritising mechanisms under the guise of WAN or application 'acceleration'. Most of the mechanisms operate by slowing other less critical data down, or by avoiding having to transmit over the WAN at all. Still, it looks like acceleration to the user and some of the techniques have achieved remarkable levels of latency reduction and throughput improvement, even if there is still further to go. The next step may well be to integrate WAN optimisation tools both with the network and the applications.