Application Performance Management Blog – Shunra Software

As part of our service offerings at Shunra’s professional services, we help our clients analyze the performance ROI of WAN acceleration. We also wrote a best practices paper about it here http://www.shunra.com/uploads/pdf/WAN-acceleration-whitepaper-031909.pdf.

Which is why I was very interested in learning about 2 new developments from Microsoft. These developments provide  improved performance for branch office users with a Windows 7 client accessing applications hosted on a Windows Server 2008 in a remote data center.

The first development is the improved TCP stack and improved SMB implementation which mitigates one of the biggest performance problems at remote branch offices around file access and web access (internal web access). More on the TCP stack performance improvements can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_networking_technologies#Network_performance and on the file transfer performance improvements (namely SMB2 improvements) you can read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block#SMB2. and more evidence to these performance enhancement for remote branch users can be found here: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/11/11/file-server-performance-improvements-with-the-smb2-protocol-in-windows-server-2008.aspx

A 2nd development that couples the next generation TCP stack is the new BranchCache feature. You can read more about it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=EE07308F-7C53-4C76-9ED9-670BC25A4C9D&displaylang=en

Why is this so interesting? Well, for many of my clients, slow file transfers and slow access to static data are big pain points. It is also one of the drivers behind the WAN acceleration industry. If the new Windows 7 – Windows 2008 R2 lives up to its promise we may see it being an interesting alternative to WAN accelerators, curious to hear what you think, especially if you had any experience with deploying any of these new solutions.

Talk to you soon,

Amichai Lesser

P.S. peer to peer torrent access to cached data inside the branch, really? !! I challenge the first IT engineer to share his experience with implementing this option.