Array Networks WAN2900
WAN Optimization Controller

Overview:

The WAN2900 is a 2RU dual-power appliance with 1Gbps throughput that supports up to 100,000 concurrent TCP connections and is commonly deployed for data center connectivity.

Array aCelera WAN Accelerators

aCelera

TCP Optimization

aCelera is Array’s core WAN optimization feature set included with every aCelera physical and virtual appliance, as well as aCelera for Windows. TCP optimizations such as window scaling, congestion avoidance, fast convergence and selective acknowledgement promote fairness between data flows, better utilization of high and low bandwidth connections and faster recovery in the event of packet loss.

Stream-Based Differencing

Patent-pending stream-based differencing enables continuous identification and analysis of larger streams of data in sequential order. Stream-based differencing facilitates the compression, organization and differencing of all data types as part of an overall data reduction and optimization process.

Application Blueprints

Application blueprints optimize protocols so they operate efficiently across wide area networks. Using techniques such as local acknowledgement of requests, request pipelining, pre-fetching data and request bundling, blueprints significantly improve application performance. In addition, blueprints provide the application intelligence required for content-aware de-duplication.

Content-Aware-De-Duplication

Strips off TCP/IP and protocol encapsulation to create a clean history that results in better data reduction, faster data transfers and superior matching for content transferred using different protocols.

Single Instance Store

aCelera’s unique single instance store provides a scalable resource to implement data differencing such that unchanged data is not sent over the network twice. In addition, the store scales linearly with available memory and enables predictive preloading based on usage patterns.

Compression & Traffic Shaping

Compresses the first pass of data, and then uses application blueprints to perform content-aware de-duplication and prevent long-term performance degradation. For business-critical applications, traffic shaping may be used to assign guaranteed bandwidth to particular hosts, networks, ports or applications.

aCelera CMS

aCelera Configuration Management System

With aCelera CMS, administrators gain a single console from which to view and manage all aCelera WAN accelerator deployments. aCelera CMS may be used with a few instances or with thousands of appliances and provides enormous benefits in streamlining management tasks.

CMS allows policies to be managed at global level rather than device by device, and allows aCelera to be deployed anywhere in the world in less than thirty minutes. In addition, CMS simplifies change management and keeps a central backup of device configurations to ensure business continuity.

Highlights & Benefits

Features:

Application & Replication Acceleration

aCelera physical and virtual appliances and software are deployed symmetrically at both ends of wide area connections, such as headquarters to branch, data center to data center, cloud to customer or remote and mobile access.

Array WAN optimization controllers eliminate traditional network constraints and geographical barriers – accelerating replication times and providing any user, anywhere with a LAN-like experience when working with business-critical applications and data.

Each aCelera WAN optimization solution shares an all-inclusive feature set and is available with right-sized concurrent connection packs for simple, cost-effective ordering.

Product Description

aCelera WAN Optimization

Array’s award-winning aCelera WAN optimization controllers help enterprises eliminate network constraints and accelerate application performance to provide a LAN-like experience when accessing applications and data from branch offices, data centers or the cloud. Array Networks® pioneered application-level acceleration and currently leads the way in cross-platform support for physical and virtual appliances and software-only WAN optimization.

Combining advanced features for application and data acceleration with flexible deployment options, aCelera WAN optimization controllers are futureproof IT investments that minimize costs and enable further consolidation of IT operations. If you require application acceleration, virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing or disaster recovery, Array aCelera can help.

Stream-Based Differencing

Array’s patent-pending stream-based differencing enables continuous identification and analysis of larger streams of data in sequential order. Streambased differencing facilitates the compression, organization and differencing of all data types as part of an overall data reduction and optimization process. Stream-based differencing efficiently utilizes system capacity to optimally support a large history database that scales along with available resources.

Single Instance Store

Single instance store provides a scalable resource to implement data differencing so that unchanged data is not sent over the network twice. The store also prevents multiple copies of the same data from being stored and maintained and enables predictive preloading based on usage patterns. The history store scales linearly with memory, and storage space adjustments are easy to implement both on physical appliances and in virtual environments.

Single instance store allows aCelera to scale to support the needs of large deployments while maintaining high levels of performance, and is critical to supporting individual users without over-utilizing data stores in the data center or cloud. Single instance store also enables peak performance for complex environments such as meshed networks.

Proxy & Connection Handling

Proxy and connection handling technologies with protocol transparency for CIFS, MAPI, HTTP, HTTPS, RPC-to-NFS and others are lightweight and high performance and are designed to integrate with and take advantage of high-performance appliances and virtualization platforms. Proxy and connection handling is not tied to underlying hardware or operating systems and scalability varies by physical appliance or with the size of CPU and memory in virtual environments.

Forwarding Plane

Forwarding plane is a proprietary technology that allows aCelera to statefully track hundreds of thousands of flows with minimal CPU impact. The forwarding plane also allows for the most flexible deployment and support of network topologies including WCCP, VRRP, PBR and static routing.

Compression

Compression provides an ideal balance between data reduction and maximized throughput by performing compression on the first pass of data and then leveraging application acceleration blueprints to deliver content-aware de-duplication that separates encapsulation from the payload to prevent long-term performance degradation.

Content-Aware De-Duplication

aCelera content-aware de-duplication goes beyond that of other WAN optimization vendors. As data streams are processed, aCelera segments and builds histories and distinguishes the protocol used to transfer the content. By stripping off both TCP/IP and protocol encapsulation, aCelera creates a clean history based on pure content.

Because disk space is not filled with protocol encapsulations that will never be matched in the future, it can be used more effectively to enable better long-term performance; moreover, content that is written cleanly gets better matching. As a result, aCelera delivers better data reduction, faster data transfers and superior matching when content is transferred using different protocols.

TCP Optimization

TCP optimization makes transfers more efficient across wide area networks and enables better utilization of both high and low bandwidth environments, faster recovery after packet loss and bandwidth fairness with other data flows. TCP optimization features include:

Window Scaling – Increases the default 64K TCP window size to ensure efficient throughput in long fat networks

Slow Start with Congestion Avoidance – Determines available bandwidth and avoids sending more data than networks can handle

Fast Convergence – Rapidly increases throughput of each new TCP connection to ensure optimum throughput

Selective Acknowledgement – Precisely determines packets lost during transmission, retransmits only lost packets

Application Blueprints

Legacy application protocols, such as CIFS for file sharing or MAPI for mail, were not designed to run over wide area networks. These protocols break data up into chunks and wait for one chunk to be received before sending another. This is known as chattiness, and chattiness can only be solved by applying application-level intelligence and optimization.

aCelera application blueprints optimize protocols so they operate efficiently across wide area networks. They use techniques such as local acknowledgements of requests, request pipelining, pre-fetching data and combining requests together to significantly accelerate applications. In addition, application blueprints provide application intelligence to the aCelera de-duplication engine to enable content-aware de-duplication.

Traffic Shaping & Secure WAN

Integrated traffic shaping and SSL encryption allow IT to prioritize and secure traffic on the network. Leveraging traffic shaping, guaranteed bandwidth may be assigned to particular hosts, networks, ports or applications. Moreover, by enabling encryption, accelerated traffic can be transmitted over SSL connections to ensure security for traffic sent between aCelera appliances.

aCelera Configuration Management System (CMS)

The aCelera configuration management system enables global configuration and deployment of physical and virtual aCelera appliances. CMS uses templates, so that settings that are common between appliances can be easily managed from one configuration. Changes only need to be made once and will propagate throughout the system, creating simplicity and eliminating errors.

CMS provides IT administrators with an easy-touse solution for centralized provisioning, drag-anddrop configuring, appliance management and a centralized view of entire aCelera deployments.

CMS was designed with the needs of the CIO and IT administrator in mind, optimizing operational efficiency for branch acceleration management and thereby lowering TCO for the enterprise.

aCelera Mobile

aCelera Mobile provides application acceleration using software installed on laptop computers for users who work remotely and independently and mobile users based out of remote offices. aCelera Mobile allows users to benefit from downloads that others in the remote office have already made.

Array’s approach to creating peering relationships between aCelera history stores allows multiple users’ histories to benefit each other, a feature which is a key differentiator between aCelera and competing solutions. Leveraging the same features and capabilities present on aCelera physical and virtual appliances, Array is able to extend industry-leading WAN optimization performance to remote and mobile environments and users.

Flexible Platform Options

aCelera is available as a physical appliance or as a virtual appliance or as software for Windows Server. Deployed as a physical appliance, aCelera is packaged on Array’s high-performance WAN Series hardware to provide the right balance of price, performance and scalability. Deployed as a virtual appliance, aCelera may be installed on industry-leading VMware ESXi hypervisors and may be scaled by increasing CPU cores, memory and disk space. Moreover, aCelera virtual appliances and software can easily be downloaded to remote locations and provisioned dynamically for desired user workloads.

In the data center, aCelera may be deployed on WAN Series hardware or stored on the disks in a SAN and automatically deployed to one or more virtual machines. By deploying the right combination of physical and virtual appliances, IT can achieve the optimal balance of performance, scalability, security, availability and affordability.

The aCelera Advantage

Array aCelera delivers superior acceleration, the ability to scale seamlessly, flexible hardware and software options for data center, cloud and remote environments, comprehensive centralized management and integration with 3rd party management systems, end-to-end security and pricing that is 30-50% less expensive versus rival solutions – enabling greater ROI in less time.

Specifications:

Array WAN Optimization Architecture

Product Specifications
	Physical Appliance	Virtual Appliance	Software	Mobile	Configuration Management System
Single Instance Store	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
Stream-Based Differencing	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
Application Blueprints	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
HTTP Optimization	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
Compression	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
TCP/IP, CIFS & MAPI Acceleration	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
Traffic Shaping & QoS	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
Secure WAN	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
NetFlow Version 5 Support	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	N/A
Centralized Configuration of aCelera Physical Appliances Virtual Appliances Windows Software Mobile Clients	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	Standard
Platform Support
	Physical Appliance	Virtual Appliance	Windows	Mobile	Configuration Management System
WAN 2100, 2300, 2500, 2900	Standard	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
VMware	N/A	Standard	N/A	N/A	N/A
Windows ServerR2	N/A	N/A	Standard	N/A	Standard
Windows 7	N/A	N/A	N/A	Standard	Standard

WAN Series Appliances
Model	1100	2100	2300	2500	2900
Throughput (Mbps)	10	20	100	310	1000 (1Gbps)
TCP Connections	40 to 1000	40 to 2400	40 to 20,000	40 to 40,000	40 to 80,000
Standard Interfaces (1GbE Copper)	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard
Bypass Ports (1GbE Copper)	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard	Standard
Bypass Ports (10GbE Fiber)	N/A	N/A	N/A	Standard	Standard
Hard Disk	500 GB	500 GB	1 TB	2 TB	2 TB
Power Supply	60W power adapter	Single: 100-24VAC, 3-1.5A, 50-60Hz		Dual: 90-264VAC, 10-5A, 47-63Hz
Dimensions	Desktop: 9.1" W x 6" D x 1.7" H	1U: 17.2" W x 11.3" D x 1.7" H		2U: 17" W x 22.5" D x 3.5" H
Weight	8.8 lbs	11 lbs		24 lbs
Environmental	Operating Temperature: 0º to 40ºC, Humidity: 10% to 85%, Noncondensing	Operating Temperature: 0° to 35°C, Humidity: 8% to 90%, Non-condensing		Operating Temperature: 0° to 45°C, Humidity: 0% to 90%, Non-condensing
Regulatory Compliance	FCC	FCC, 47FR part 15 Class A		ICES-003, EN 55024, CISPR 22, AS/NZS 3548, FCC, 47FR part 15 Class A, VCCI-A
Safety	CE	CSA, C/US, CE, UL, IEC 60950-1, CSA 60950-1, EN 60950-1
Virtual Appliance & Software System Requirements
Server Hardware	Certified on VMware hardware compatibility list to run ESX or ESXi; Certified for Windows ServerR2
64-bit CPU	Intel CPUs with VT (virtualization technology); AMD CPUs with AMD-V support
Network Interface Card	1 available Ethernet interface for out-of-line deployments; 2 available Ethernet interfaces for inline deployments
Hardware	2 GB RAM; 30 GB free disk space

Documentation:

Download the Array Networks aCelera WAN Optimization Controller Datasheet (PDF).