1. Dell SonicWALL WAN Acceleration (WXA) Overview
Name
Title
The following presentation covers the Dell SonicWALL WAN Acceleration (WXA) solution.

2. What Does WAN Acceleration Do?
WAN Acceleration technology helps to…
Improve performance of business applications
Optimize response times for critical applications
Reduce bandwidth consumption
Reduce associated bandwidth costs
…makes the network appear faster!
As a technology, WAN Acceleration provides some significant benefits. These include:
Improving the performance of business-critical applications
Optimizing response times for these applications. In the next few slides we’ll talk more about the different business applications that can be accelerated and how they are accelerated
Reducing the bandwidth that network users consume
Finally, lowering consumption leads to a reduction in bandwidth costs. Why pay for more bandwidth when a solution exists to help you better utilize the bandwidth you already have?
When you put these all together, you have a network that’s not only more efficient, it’s also faster.

3. The Need for WAN Acceleration
Web content
Outpaced by growing bandwidth requirements
Traditional QoS ineffective
Application latency
Redundant traffic consuming bandwidth
There are many reasons why companies look to utilize WAN Acceleration technology. These include:
The growth in the number of applications being used by companies is outpacing their bandwidth requirements. One reason could be cost. IT organizations may not have the ongoing budget to increase bandwidth for all locations. There could also be infrastructure limitations which might not allow for higher Internet bandwidth to be available.
Another reason is, traditional Quality of Service might be ineffective at allocating and controlling bandwidth. Companies need to look for products that support the ability to fingerprint specific applications and allow network administrators to either block the application out right or provide some bandwidth controls.
In most cases, applications that may have been designed to work really well on Local Area Networks where bandwidth is higher and latency is lower, may NOT be suited to work in situations where the bandwidth is lower and latency is higher. In cases where latency is high, the application may seem slow or even non-responsive.
Finally, redundant traffic is also an issue. If the same data is moving between offices, WAN Acceleration can help reduce the amount of data by only sending the delta.

4. The Dell SonicWALL Approach
Dell SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewall
Traffic Shaping – allow “Good Traffic”
Ensure “Good Traffic” composition with Application Intelligence and Control
Block unwanted traffic
Utilize bandwidth effectively
Dell SonicWALL WXA Solution
Traffic Acceleration – accelerate the traffic
HTTP web caching
Accelerate the “Good” traffic between offices
Traffic de-duplication
Windows File Share caching
Protocol optimization
Compression
Dell SonicWALL has its own approach to WAN Acceleration. Let’s take a look.
We’ll start with a discussion of two key technologies at the core of Dell SonicWALL’s WAN Acceleration approach: Traffic Shaping and Traffic Acceleration.
Traffic Shaping is a means of ensuring the traffic that goes through your network is “good” or “business-critical” and not “bad” or non-essential and time-wasting. Dell SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewalls provide the tools that enable IT administrators to determine and categorize good traffic from bad, and then block unwanted traffic while prioritizing the good. Doing so helps them utilize the bandwidth that they have more effectively. We’ll talk more about this shortly.
The other technology that Dell SonicWALL WAN Acceleration appliances utilize is Traffic Acceleration which consists of three components. The first of these is Traffic, or File, De-duplication. Here, the data that makes up a file is broken down into sequences where the commonly-seen, or “duplicate,” sequences are replaced with a token that the remote end recognizes and uses to re-assemble the message. This decreases the amount of data that needs to be sent across the link. The second is Windows File Sharing acceleration, which helps improve response times while decreasing the amount of data transferred when downloading or accessing files from a shared drive. And finally, Protocol Optimization provides LAN-like application performance for users accessing resources over the WAN by decreasing the latency and chattiness presented by inefficient protocols or application communication.

5. Traffic Shaping – Get “Good” Traffic
WAN Acceleration Step 1
Bandwidth manage and control applications
Dell SonicWALL Application Intelligence, Control and Visualization
4,100+ Application signatures
Identify Applications
Prioritize important traffic
Block or restrict unimportant traffic
Goal:
“Allow Good Traffic” at the gateway with Application Intelligence and Control
Now we’ll break these into two steps. The first step in WAN Acceleration – Traffic Shaping - can be achieved using Dell SonicWALL Application Intelligence, Control and Visualization which is available on Dell SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewalls. Application Intelligence, Control and Visualization enables IT administrators to indentify and categorize applications. Not only do you have the ability to identify the applications being used on your network, you also have control over whether or not the applications can be used, who can use them, when they can be used and how much bandwidth you want to allocate to the applications.

6. “Good Traffic” Acceleration
WAN Acceleration Step 2
Extremely effective for office-to-office:
, PowerPoint, Excel spreadsheets, Word docs, PDFs
Web apps, collaboration sites
Files between 20Kb-100’s of MB+
Small localized changes
Also for Internet-based content:
Web content, videos, etc,
Benefits (for “Good Traffic”)
Eliminate redundant traffic
Increase responsiveness
Improve user experience
The second step in WAN Acceleration is the acceleration of “good” traffic. Unlike Traffic Shaping which happens on the firewall, Traffic Acceleration is handled by the WAN Acceleration solution. Traffic Acceleration works very well on many of the applications you use on a daily basis such as , Microsoft Office apps including Word, PowerPoint and Excel, PDFs, file sharing sites and Web 2.0 apps. It doesn’t matter if the file size is small or large. Traffic Acceleration is more effective if the changes made to the file are smaller, but this is something you can monitor in the appliance’s local management interface which you can see to the right.
So how can a WAN Acceleration solution from Dell SonicWALL help customers? It’s simple. Reducing and even eliminating redundant traffic going between remote or branch office networks decreases latency, which speeds up responsiveness, both of which improve the experience of customers’ employees. Not only that, it enables them to be more productive.

7. 1) Protocol Optimization
WXA Series Technology
Four key technologies for accelerating “Good Traffic”
1) Protocol Optimization
Reduce latency
Reduce chattiness
2) WFS Acceleration
Increase speed
3) Byte-Caching
& Data
De-duplication
Reduce bandwidth consumption
4) Web Caching
They are three primary technologies in use on the WXA solution:
1. Protocol optimization:
Reduces the chattiness of certain protocols such as Windows File Sharing (WFS)
Optimizes protocols like Windows File Sharing, FTP and
Makes an intelligent decision about the nature of the traffic to eliminate latency
Decreases round-trips and chattiness of certain protocols
WFS Acceleration:
Improves response times and transfer speeds when copying files between remote locations (by decreasing the amount of data needing to be sent across the WAN)
Acceleration for Windows File Copy protocols
CIFS and SMB: Protocol names for file transfer
File caching/de-duplication
Metadata caching (File directory information)
Active Directory integration (The WXA becomes part of the domain)
Byte Caching and Data De-duplication:
A method by which two caching appliances (WXA  appliances) work in conjunction to cache information being transmitted between two locations. For the Dell SonicWALL deployment, the data would be transmitted through a site-to-site VPN connection. The WXA appliances will build a table of data being transferred between the two appliances. Once the data exists on both WXA appliances a token, or tag, is created to represent the data. This newly created tag or token can be used in place of the original data, so when the traffic is seen at one location, it can be replaced with the tag or token. This assigned tag or token would be sent across the VPN tunnel. On the other side a WXA appliance would recognize the tag or token and replace it with the information requested. Doing this reduces the amount of data that is being sent between the two locations through the VPN tunnel.

8. Dell SonicWALL WXA Series
WXA 500 software
WXA 6000 software
WXA 2000
WXA 4000
You already know Dell SonicWALL is a leading provider of Next-Generation Firewalls for businesses of all sizes. However you may not be aware that we have a portfolio of powerful, yet affordable, WAN Acceleration solutions called the WXA Series. The WXA Series is available in several delivery models to meet customers’ needs, including the WXA 500 Live CD, WXA 2000 and WXA 4000 hardware appliances, as well as the WXA 5000 Virtual Appliance. Unlike standalone WAN acceleration products, Dell SonicWALL WXA solutions are integrated add-ons to Dell SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewalls so they’re easy to deploy and manage.
WXA 5000

9. Multi-Site VPN Deployment
Multiple remote offices connecting back to a central office
Solution Requirements
TZ/NSA firewalls
WXA appliances
Site-to-site VPN tunnels
There are two main deployment scenarios to target with the Dell SonicWALL WXA Series. The first of these is the multi-site network where the customer has a central headquarters and several remote or branch offices all connected to each other using site-to-site VPN. In this example, the customer has a Dell SonicWALL E-Class NSA Next-Generation Firewall at the central office along with a WXA 4000.
Each of the remote offices also has a Dell SonicWALL NSA or TZ Series firewall and corresponding WXA Series appliance. All the firewalls are running Dell SonicWALL Application Intelligence, Control and Visualization which enables the IT administrator to identify, control, manage and prioritize application usage and bandwidth across the network. By combining the firewalls with the WXA appliances, traffic between the sites can also be optimized and accelerated with minimal effort required to configure the solution.
Results: Traffic between the sites is optimized with minimal configuration

10. Using Dedicated WAN Links
Leveraging dedicated WAN links between offices
Solution Requirements
TZ/NSA firewalls
WXA appliances
Dedicated WAN Links
Similarly, multi-site networks that rely on routing technologies such as MPLS which utilizes a dedicated line also benefit from this combination. Traffic between the sites is accelerated across the WAN links, whether from a remote office to the central site or between remote offices.
Results: Traffic between the sites is optimized with minimal configuration

11. HTTP (Web) Caching Deployment
Solution Requirements
TZ/NSA Next-Generation Firewall
WXA appliance
Internet-based content
Similarly, multi-site networks that rely on routing technologies such as MPLS which utilizes a dedicated line also benefit from this combination. Traffic between the sites is accelerated across the WAN links, whether from a remote office to the central site or between remote offices.
Results: Reduction in traffic load for Internet-based content

12. Unified Management Interface
WXA management through host firewall interface
Firewall takes care of
Auto-provisioning of the WXA hardware or software solution (similar to SonicPoints)
WXA license management (support)
Firmware and configuration managed of the WXA appliance
Health check probes of the WXA appliance
Consolidated management
Application Control
Deep Packet Inspection
WAN Acceleration
VPN Management and more
Since the WXA is managed directly through SonicOS, there is a single management interface for Application Control, Deep Packet Inspection and WAN Acceleration configuration and management.
The Firewall provides:
Auto-provisioning of the WXA hardware or software
WXA license management
Firmware and configuration management of the WXA appliance
Health check probes of the local and remote WXA appliances so that in the event one device failed, traffic would no longer be routed to the WXA, but directly through the firewall without being accelerated.

13. Enabling TCP Acceleration Simple Process for Easy Deployment
Firewall decides what traffic needs to be accelerated
Default is “everything” that we can accelerate
Benefit: Decreases the amount of data sent over to the WXA for processing
Since the management of the WXA is done directly from the SonicOS interface, enabling TCP acceleration is fairly straight forward. A simple check box turned on by default will enable TCP based acceleration if two or more WXA appliances are available. The administrator can configure several options including:
All TCP services except those excluded by default (This is the default setting)
All TCP services expect those specified in the TCP Acceleration Service Object
All TCP services expect those specified in the TCP Acceleration Service Object and those excluded by default
Only TCP services specified in the TCP Acceleration Service Object

14. WFS Configuration
Supports both unsigned and signed SMB based configuration options
For Windows File Sharing, the configuration is a little more complex because additional information is required including:
Configuring the WXA to become part of the domain
Adding the remote and local server or device names
Benefit: Decreases the amount of redundant data sent between sites

15. Web HTTP Caching Enable Web Caching Set the Caching Strategy
Minimal - Objects are stored in the cache for up to 72 hours
Moderate - Keeps objects in the cache for 7 days
Aggressive - Ignores explicit expiry time enforcing a minimum age of 7 days

16. WXA Client configuration
Enable the WXA Client in settings
Licensed per concurrent user

17. WXA Client, NetExtender configuration
WXAC tab appears if licensed
Plug-in is downloaded directly from the WXA appliance
For devices running Windows

18. Demonstrating and Quantifying the Benefits of WAN Acceleration
Visualizing the benefits of using WAN Acceleration
Demonstrating packet acceleration into and out of the WXA solution is simple using the built-in visualization capabilities. You can easily provide statistics detailing traffic reduction, the increase in WAN capacity and more in a variety of formats. Visualization is a powerful tool for showing exactly how the WXA Series can improve the performance of WAN applications.

19. Doesn’t Compromise Security
SonicWALL Solution
Sits inside of the security boundary
Provides comprehensive scanning for intrusions and malware
Leverages Dell SonicWALL DPI providing IPS/GAV/AS/App Intelligence
Traditional Solution
Sits behind or outside of the security boundary
Data coming out of the WAN Acceleration device can’t be inspected by the security device
Potential for malware propagation
Firewall
Since the WXA is part of the Next-Generation Firewall and the two products work in conjunction with each other, we can scan all traffic through our DPI engine to provide increased security.
The advantages the Dell SonicWALL solution provide:
Sits inside of the security boundary which allows traffic to be scanned through the Dell SonicWALL DPI engine.
This includes scanning for intrusions and malware
Dell SonicWALL NSA
WAN Acceleration
Ingress/Egress traffic
Ingress/Egress traffic
Dell SonicWALL WXA

20. WAN Acceleration Customer Scenario
Multiple office locations
Main office with 120 people
5 remote offices with (10-15 people)
Limited bandwidth at remote offices (e.g. 2 Mbps)
Internal applications
Internal Web Application
Windows File Sharing
Existing Dell SonicWALL customer with VPN connectivity
The following is a typical deployment scenario for WAN Acceleration.
Multiple office locations
Bandwidth is limited at some or all of the remote sites
Application usage includes web and Windows File Sharing
Existing Dell SonicWALL customer using our VPN technology to connect office locations

21. Bandwidth Savings for Internal Web Apps
Up to 90% traffic reduction for internal web traffic
Here is a typical customer scenario showing upwards of 90% or more reduction for internal web traffic traveling between remote locations and the corporate office while using the VPN connection.

22. Bandwidth Savings for Windows File Sharing (WFS)
Up to 80+% traffic reduction for Windows File Sharing
For Windows File Sharing it’s possible to see upwards of 80% reduction in traffic between the remote offices and the corporate office.

23. Bandwidth Savings for Web Caching
Up to 40+% traffic reduction for Internet-based content
For Windows File Sharing it’s possible to see upwards of 80% reduction in traffic between the remote offices and the corporate office.

24. The Dell SonicWALL Advantage
Why Dell SonicWALL is the right choice
Bandwidth optimization, application control and web caching
Comprehensive DPI scanning for intrusions and malware
Simplified deployment, configuration and management +
Here are the key advantages of the Dell SonicWALL WXA Series.
A WXA Series solution deployed with a Dell SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewall running Deep Packet Inspection plus application intelligence and control provides bandwidth optimization, intrusion prevention and malware protection
Unlike traditional WAN Acceleration products, Dell SonicWALL WXA solutions sit inside the security boundary, enabling comprehensive scanning for intrusions and malware
The Dell SonicWALL WXA solution is auto-detected and auto-provisioned by the managing Dell SonicWALL firewall, simplifying deployment, configuration and management

25. Questions?

26. Appendix

27. Technical and Feature Specs
WXA 500 Software
WXA 2000
WXA 4000
WXA 5000
Virtual Appl.
WXA 6000
Software
Minimum SonicOS Version
SonicOS
SonicOS
Platform
Hardware
Virtual Appliance
Recommended Concurrent Users1 20
120
240
360
2,000
Maximum WAN Acceleration Connections
100
600
1,200
1,800
10,000
Byte Caching
Yes
Web (HTTP) Caching
TCP Acceleration
Compression
CIFS/SMB Acceleration
Yes2
Signed SMB Support
WXAC Client
Yes3
Visualization
TCP/WFS/Cache
Let’s review the key technical and feature specs of the Dell SonicWALL WXA Series solutions. This information is important because it will help you match the right WXA solution to fit your customers’ needs.
We’ll begin with the minimum firmware version required on the Dell SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewall to which the WXA solutions are attached. The firewalls must be running SonicOS or higher
The WXA Series comes in four platforms – there is a software version, the WXA 500 Live CD, two hardware versions, the WXA 2000 and WXA 4000 and a virtual appliance, the WXA 5000
The next two features – Recommended Concurrent Users and Maximum WAN Acceleration Connections – are inter-related. It’s important to understand that each concurrent user may have more than one active WAN Acceleration connection at any time. Dell SonicWALL calculates the maximum number of connections by using an average of five flows per user. The more users your customer has, the greater the number of connections they will have, so be sure to talk with your customers about the number of concurrent users they will have.
All four Dell SonicWALL WXA solutions include the following features – byte caching, TCP acceleration, Compression and Windows File Sharing Acceleration
In addition, to show the benefits of WAN Acceleration, all four models also include visualization capabilities that show the data reduction for both TCP and Windows File Sharing.
1Maximum users may vary and will depend on the number of connections generated per user. SonicWALL determines the recommended users based on 5 connections per user.
2CIFS/SMB acceleration is available only when the Live CD image is installed on the provided hardware
3Requires SonicOS 5.9.

28. What Applications Can be Accelerated?
Internal web applications
FTP transfers
Windows File Sharing resources
SharePoint
Database apps
Backup and Recovery (client-to-appliance CDP)
Database replication
and more…
The following are applications in which the WXA series can accelerate. This is not a complete list, but is a well-known list of applications that can benefit from WAN acceleration.
Internal web applications
File transfers over FTP
Windows File Sharing
SharePoint
Database applications
Backup and Recovery from a client to a Dell SonicWALL CDP appliance
Dell Equalogic
Database replications

29. Internet Content That Can be Cached
YouTube videos
Corporate videos
Web sites
Other web-based content
The following are applications in which the WXA series can accelerate. This is not a complete list, but is a well-known list of applications that can benefit from WAN acceleration.
Internal web applications
File transfers over FTP
Windows File Sharing
SharePoint
Database applications
Backup and Recovery from a client to a Dell SonicWALL CDP appliance
Dell Equalogic
Database replications

30. What Cannot be Accelerated?
Encrypted traffic
SSL, IPSec
Compressed traffic
Gzip, RAR, 7-zip, bzip
Video, Audio
Virtual Desktop solutions
RDP, Citrix
Non-repeating traffic
Single file in one direction sent once
Single web page access
While the WXA Series can accelerate many applications, it’s important to note there are some types of applications it cannot. These include:
Traffic encrypted using SSL or IPSec
Traffic that has been compressed using file compression software as well as video and audio files that have built-in compression
Desktop virtualization solutions such as RDP and Citrix
And any traffic that is non-repeating
The rule of thumb to remember is, “What does not repeat cannot be cached and accelerated.”
What does not repeat can not be cached and accelerated!