12 March 2012

Meraki's WAN Optimization SAVES PARTNERS TIME & MONEY. Request a FREE TRIAL NOW

Here at Cloud Distribution we believe that WAN Optimization has become a technology which is far to complex for most end users to implement, manage and control. Meraki's MX range of Security Appliances collapse WANOP into the edge security device allowing you, the reseller, to sell it quickly saving time and money. Why sell a point solution which takes 60-90 days to sell when you can sell a complete edge device solution (including L7 Firewall, Packet Shaping, Content Filtering, VPN, NAC etc. etc.).

Here's how easy it is to enable WAN Optimization to a Meraki MX Security Appliance network:


Figure 1: WAN optimization configuration

After that, the MXs that are part of the site-to-site VPN network will accelerate the FTP, HTTP, Windows file sharing (CIFS/SMB) and TCP-based traffic between them. There’s no additional cost to roll this out, and WAN optimization is available on the MX for customers with both the Enterprise and Advanced Security licenses.

Here’s a look at the WAN optimization of traffic between Meraki’s branches and San Francisco headquarters. At the time of this snapshot, the amount of data transfered across the WAN was reduced by 95.2%.
Figure 2: WAN optimization and bandwidth reduction
WAN optimization is available on all MX Cloud Managed Security Appliances. The MX80, MX90, and MX400 include a 1 TB hard drive for local caching, and the MX600 includes a 4 TB (RAID) drive. The MX60 doesn’t include an internal hard drive, but it still benefits from WAN optimization’s compression and protocol optimization.

By using WAN optimization technology built in to the Meraki MX, administrators can dramatically reduce bandwidth costs and accelerate application performance for traffic that flows between sites of a distributed network. Slow, high latency WAN links that connect branches can be accelerated, making the WAN feel like the LAN for users at remote sites.