Cisco WAAS performance reporting with NetFlow lets you, as a network administrator, measure how effective your acceleration/optimization methods are working across your WAN.
With the expansion of branch offices, addition of applications like VoIP and video, and data center consolidation, today’s networks are seeing more WAN traffic than ever. This means more focus on the WAN capabilities. The WAN is no longer just expensive network infrastructure, it has become an asset that network managers can leverage to benefit their bottom line.
In an enterprise WAN, the goal of optimization is to increase the speed of access to critical applications and information. WAN optimization, also known as WAN acceleration, uses a number of technologies and techniques to maximize the efficiency of data flow across a wide area network (WAN).
WAN optimization encompasses:
- Traffic shaping, in which traffic is prioritized and bandwidth is allotted accordingly.
- Data deduplication, which reduces the data that must be sent across a WAN for remote backups, replication, and disaster recovery.
- Compression, which shrinks the size of data to limit bandwidth use.
- Data caching, in which frequently used data is hosted locally or on a local server for faster access.
- Monitoring the network to detect non-essential traffic.
- Creating and enforcing rules about downloads and Internet use.
- Protocol spoofing, which is a method of bundling chatty protocols so they are, in effect, a single protocol.
Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), provides the technologies necessary to consolidate infrastructure in the data center while providing application acceleration and WAN optimization capabilities that achieve application delivery performance similar to that of a LAN. Utilizing the Cisco Performance Agent and NetFlow exports you can measure/report on WAAS performance, and really know how efficient these optimization methods are performing on your network.
We calculate the percent of compression by considering the postOctetDeltaCount and postPacketDeltaCount elements that are exported in NetFlow v9.
These Cisco WAAS NetFlow reports give network administrators an accurate insight into how well WAAS is optimizing applications across the WAN.
You can see that in the interface table below there are both Cisco and Exinda interfaces. So this reporting is not limited to Cisco as a single vendor.
We have also built reports to monitor Cisco NBAR application optimization.
We also can provide Cisco WAAS performance reports using any of the WAAS information elements now exported in NetFlow v9 or IPFIX.
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With today’s networks using more bandwidth-heavy applications such as video or virtual desktops, network admins are challenged with two important but competing needs. How to optimize the network response time and how to reduce bandwidth costs.
WAN optimization provides the answer to both of these needs.
Call us and we can show you how our advanced NetFlow and IPFIX reporting solution and Cisco WAAS NetFlow lets you measure the results.