Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is technology developed by Cisco Systems that optimizes the performance of any TCP-based application operating in a wide area network (WAN) environment while preserving and strengthening branch security. WAAS combines WAN optimization, acceleration of TCP-based applications, and Cisco's Wide Area File Services (WAFS) in a single appliance or blade. It is Cisco's attempt to keep WAN optimization residing firmly in the router, eliminating the need to deploy acceleration appliances throughout the infrastructure. The technology preserves TCP information within the network while offering the performance benefits that come along with using WAN optimization technology.
WAN optimization appliances have traditionally limited IT when it comes to maintaining functions such as security, Quality of Service, visibility, and monitoring end-to-end transactions because they tend to cause problems for most network monitoring devices and tools. By design, WAN Optimization “confuses” performance monitoring systems by changing packet header data.
Latest Release
Cisco's latest WAAS software release, announced at the 2007 Cisco Networkers conference, is the industry's first solution for both end-to-end monitoring and acceleration of application traffic.
Famous quotes containing the words wide, area, application and/or services:
“Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli (14691527)
“The area [of toilet training] is one where a child really does possess the power to defy. Strong pressure leads to a powerful struggle. The issue then is not toilet training but who holds the reinsmother or child? And the child has most of the ammunition!”
—Dorothy Corkville Briggs (20th century)
“It would be disingenuous, however, not to point out that some things are considered as morally certain, that is, as having sufficient certainty for application to ordinary life, even though they may be uncertain in relation to the absolute power of God.”
—René Descartes (15961650)
“Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)