So, you’ve moved a plethora of applications to the cloud and have started down the Office365 path. You’ve made it through Day 2 of operations, and things seem to be going rather smoothly. In fact, the corks on the champagne bottles are off, and the network and systems engineers are feeling great about the project coming to a successful end. All seems right with the world.
Or does it?
That first SaaS bill hits your budget, and you scratch your head and think, ‘That can’t be right, can it? Maybe it’s just the migration activities.’ Then the second and third bills start showing up, and there’s a noticeable upward trend. While you spent all that time thinking about application migration activities, you didn’t quite get the cost models down.
Now, there are rumblings of performance issues and you wish you hadn’t popped the cork just yet. What are you going to do?
The Head of Steel!
With a problem like this, there are a few ways to tackle it, but one, in particular, makes sense. Think about having one product in your CSP environment that can improve your client performance and reduce your CSP expense.
If you review the Amazon Web Services cost model, for example, you’ll see that you’re charged on outbound traffic. Depending on how much data goes out from the disc directly impacts how much antacid the managers need to ingest. You need to optimize the egress traffic to reduce your expenditures.
Riverbed’s Cloud Accelerator and SaaS Accelerator are ideal solutions for this problem. Optimizing the data flows leaving your network reduces the amount of egress money you pay to the big cloud providers.
SaaS Accelerator claims up to a 99% reduction in network congestion, improving user performance, and lowering bandwidth costs. Surely that can’t be correct? How can you get that kind of performance benefit through TCP/UDP compression or caching?
That technology seems so 1990’s, right? The answer to that question is, ‘absolutely not’. There have been quite a few changes since the compression of the ’90s as compared to today’s model.
The SteelHead installed in your CSP uses optimization technologies like Data, Application, Transport, and/or Management Streamlining to improve the application session. Perhaps your StealHead sees a pattern of transmission delay due to latency or bandwidth congestion. It can optimize the TCP connections using Transport Streamlining, for example. TCP can be chatty so why send extra packets if you don’t need to? The fewer bits and bytes you need to send—since that data either already exists near the requesting host or doesn’t need to be sent to begin with—the bandwidth consumption drops and so does your usage bill.
What’s Going On?
The second part of the system is the visibility you have into the optimized application. For all of the early cloud adopters out there, you know what monitoring is like for SaaS and IaaS deployments. It’s practically nil. What if you had a device in the middle of the data stream that could provide such visibility? SaaS Accelerator delivers this information, too.
All of the complaints from end-users you had received for poor performance can now start to be isolated. To tamp down their issues you need performance information. SaaS Accelerator has informative reports within the Traffic Summary view in SaaS Accelerator Manager. These reports provide information like bandwidth savings and client information, giving you a view into your user’s experience.
These IaaS enhancements to your cloud and SaaS deployment address your need to support your users and business units. The IT staff is held accountable for cloud-based technology support, but you can’t support it if you can’t ‘see’ your services. You certainly can’t win if you’re paying a high cost for poor performance. The Riverbed product gives you clean visibility and application optimizing features.
https://www.riverbed.com/products/steelhead/saas-accelerator.html
