Information technology (“IT”) management in organizations that operate branch offices must accommodate the often-conflicting needs of local-like application performance and manageability versus deployment costs. To reduce total cost of ownership (“TCO”), there is a trend where branch office servers are consolidated, and services and applications are pushed from the LAN (local area network) to being hosted across a WAN (wide area network) from a hub that is commonly located at an enterprise's headquarters location. While such branch and hub architectures can provide substantial cost benefits, the reliance on WAN resources can often lead to depleted bandwidth and increased end-user wait time. This typically results in a reduction in the quality of the user experience at a branch office compared to that at the main office, and an overall loss of productivity in the branch.
One solution to the problem has been to add more wide area bandwidth, and historically data services commonly consume a large portion of enterprise IT budgets. However, incremental increases in bandwidth can carry a disproportionate price increase and limiting factors such as network latency and application behavior can restrict both performance and the return on bandwidth investment.
WAN optimization solutions such as wide area file systems (“WAFS”) have emerged that seek to enable the cost advantages provided by centralized servers without compromising performance by maximizing WAN utilization which can often delay or eliminate the need to purchase additional WAN bandwidth. While such solutions can provide significant benefits and typically represent a good return on investment, current WAN optimization and WAFS solutions are typically file- or data-oriented and do not take users' behaviors into account. Accordingly, additional opportunities still remain for more effective WAN optimization.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.