F5: acceleration 101

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White Paper
Acceleration 101
Incoming packets are decrypted, then processed. The acceleration device can perform caching, compression, and web/application optimizations before passing packets to the server. Outgoing packets can undergo acceleration optimizations, then undergo encryption before being transmitted over the WAN.
Remote office users can also benefit from having an acceleration device in the remote office to perform SSL processing. Client requests for static data or data that has undergone deduplication can be served locally, greatly reducing response time. Compression can be optimized for the WAN link, ensuring the best possible perfomance.
Claudia, the security architect, tells Kristina that Wonder Widgets, Inc. is already using SSL offload in the Paris data center to accelerate consumer traffic and corporate web traffic. She suggests using SSL offload between the Paris and San Diego sites and between the Paris and Beijing sites to help improve performance. They agree to use SSL offload between sites wherever it makes sense.
Conclusion
Kristina and her team have seen for themselves that application acceleration is viable technology that can improve user productivity, ensure remote application deployments are successful, and help boost their online sales. By optimizing TCP, other protocols, applications, and data flows, Wonder Widgets, Inc. and, its internal users, customers, partners, and suppliers can benefit from acceleration. They’re already using some aspects of acceleration, but see that implementing advanced Application Delivery Controllers and web acceleration can help ensure that the complex new Web 2.0 applications they’ve implemented and are implementing now run well and delight users.
It is important to understand that acceleration is not a “one size fits all” set of features. Some features are widely implemented, while others are limited to one or a small subset of vendors. The most important decisions should be choosing a partner you can trust and choosing the solution that gives you the best application acceleration return for your investment.