Achieve Up to 34 Times Faster Downloads and 50 Percent Faster Site Navigation While Saving Up to 88 Percent Bandwidth over Slow WAN Links
Overview
Geographically distributed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployments often face performance challenges due to network bandwidth and/or latency limitations. The use of Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is recommended for optimizing the performance and bandwidth use of Microsoft Office SharePoint over a wide area network (WAN).
With Cisco WAAS deployed across the WAN, IT teams can gain improvements in the network delivery of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as seen in Table 1.
Table 1. Performance and Bandwidth Benefits with Cisco WAAS
Site Navigation
Document Downloads
Up to 50% faster
Up to 34X faster
Up to 88% bandwidth savings
Up to 88% bandwidth savings
Challenge
New business and IT trends have dramatically changed the way enterprise applications are deployed. Although new implementations significantly increase productivity and automate business processes, they present challenges when running over today's wide area networks. Such challenges can equate to poor user performance and inefficient bandwidth utilization, which threatens application success. These challenges are caused by two major factors: limited WAN links and inefficient protocols.
Limited WAN Links
Globalization through acquisitions, offshoring, and skills-based rather than location-based hiring has spread the workforce across the world to serve new markets. At the same time, in many situations, to reduce IT costs and complexity and to consolidate their businesses, companies have centralized data centers and applications.
This combination of globalization and centralization increases the average WAN distance to the user. Longer transit times, or latency, between the user and the application server, coupled with bandwidth limitations result in inefficient communication and slower transactions between the clients and servers.
Inefficient Protocols Impede User Performance
Meanwhile, new application deployments which use the Web browser as the client and Internet standard protocols such as HTTP, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), benefit from increased usability and decreased complexity. However, such protocols may require intensive user-to-server and server-to-server round trip transactions, which in some cases may result in slower application performance to remote employees.
Given these two factors-limited WAN links and inefficient protocols that increasingly stress the network-maintaining acceptable user performance over WAN links is a significant challenge for today's networks running enterprise applications; a challenge which can negatively impact corporate productivity and application adoption.
To address the challenges of user performance and bandwidth utilization, Microsoft has supported Cisco in testing, documenting, and validating Cisco's WAAS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Business Benefits
Typical Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 implementations may include a centrally deployed application infrastructure and business logic serving sometimes hundreds or thousands of remote users stretched around the world. The addition of Cisco WAAS to such implementations with remote WAN links can lead to the following benefits of Cisco network technologies:
• LAN-like application performance across slow WAN links
– Up to 50 percent faster Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site navigation
– Up to 34 times faster Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 document downloads
• Reduced WAN use with no changes to application, bandwidth, security, server, or storage
– Up to 88 percent less bandwidth use for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
– Preservation of network protocol information to support and maintain existing network security, quality of service (QoS), visibility, and monitoring
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes an integrated suite of server capabilities on which a multitude of applications and portals can be built. Thus, the benefits of Cisco WAAS will vary for each deployment.
In addition, significantly lower application total cost of ownership (TCO) can be achieved through decreased bandwidth requirements to serve new applications and much higher user productivity. In some circumstances, considerable return on investment (ROI) for adding Cisco WAAS to such deployments can be achieved in 6 months or less considering that users will see performance benefits and IT departments will see bandwidth use decreases and bandwidth increase avoidance between locations where Cisco WAAS is deployed.
Solution
Microsoft and Cisco collaboration on the testing of Cisco WAAS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 resulted in a recommended network architecture and best practices for the deployment of Cisco WAAS both in the same location as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and at each appropriate branch-office location (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Architectural Diagram of Cisco WAAS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Cisco WAAS, to deliver the aforementioned benefits, uses advanced compression and caching, Cisco WAAS Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE), and protocol acceleration to help overcome bandwidth, throughput, and latency limitations associated with TCP/IP and application protocols across the WAN.
Additionally, the solution requires no changes to Microsoft SharePoint applications or to bandwidth, security, servers, or storage.
Cisco WAAS can be transparently deployed with other Cisco network solutions, including application and Ethernet switching, firewall access control, storage switching, Internet telephony, and network management, to create a complete, integrated network architecture with market-leading products that have been tested and validated by Cisco. Cisco WAAS also comes with post-deployment investment protection as Cisco is the global lifecycle services leader, recently certified by J.D. Power and Associates in their Certified Technology Service and Support Program.
Testing
In tests conducted in May 2007 by Microsoft and Cisco® at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, LAN-like user performance and network bandwidth utilization benefits were achieved by the addition of Cisco WAN optimization solutions to a centralized Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment with simulated user access over challenging WAN links.
To conduct such tests, engineers from Microsoft and Cisco installed Cisco WAAS in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server engineering labs in Redmond, Washington, to replicate a scenario in which a user accesses a typical Microsoft SharePoint application over the WAN from Microsoft Internet Explorer on a Windows system. The setup remained constant through all tests (see Table 2).
Table 2. Cisco WAAS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Lab Setup
Features
Description
Branch System
One system with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows XP 2003 with Service Pak (SP) 2
Data Center Systems
Two systems with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and SQL Server 2005 with SP1
Network Infrastructure
• One Cisco Catalyst 3560 Series Switch with virtual partitioning
• Two Cisco 2821 Integrated Services Routers
• Two Cisco WAE-612 Wide Area Application Engines running Cisco WAAS Software 4.0.9
• One central manager Cisco WAE-512 with Cisco WAAS Software 4.0.9
• One WAN bridge for simulation
Two types of user transaction tests were conducted: site navigation-personal site, team site, document library, and search site-and document downloads-500-KB and 2-MB Microsoft Word documents.
Four simulated WAN links were tested to represent typical branch office-to-data center connections, as shown in Table 3.
Table 3. Cisco WAAS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Four simulated WAN links
Description
Bandwidth
Round-Trip Latency
Packet Loss
Intercontinental Low Bandwidth
512 Kbps
200 ms
0.5%
Intercontinental High Bandwidth
4 Mbps
200 ms
0.5%
Intra-Continental Low Bandwidth
1.544 Kbps
80 ms
0.1%
Intra-Continental High Bandwidth
45 Mbps
80 ms
0.1%
The Results: User Performance
Representative summaries of test results for user performance improvements in site navigation and document downloads are shown in Tables 4 and 5.
Table 4. Cisco WAAS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Site Navigation Performance Improvements
WAN Link
No Browser Cache
With Browser Cache
Intercontinental Low Bandwidth
47% faster
53% faster
Intra-Continental Low Bandwidth
39%
41%
Intra-Continental High Bandwidth
29%
28%
Table 5. Cisco WAAS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Document Download Performance Improvements cache from previous transaction
WAN Link
2-MB Word Document
500-KB Word Document
Intercontinental Low Bandwidth
34X faster
7X faster
Intercontinental High Bandwidth
26X
4X
Intra-Continental Low Bandwidth
11X
2X
From these results, it is clear that there are strong benefits in network performance to be gained by adding Cisco WAAS in scenarios where there are geographically far reaching Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployments with high latency or low speed WAN connections.
The Results: Bandwidth Utilization
Representative summaries of test results for bandwidth utilization improvements for site navigation transactions without WAAS and then with WAAS are shown in Figures 2 and 3. The two graphs show bandwidth utilization decreases from an average of about 175 kbps to 20 kbps, or 88 percent.
As with conclusions drawn from the performance tests, it is clear that strong cost savings can be achieved by deploying Cisco WAAS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for specific scenarios.
Figure 2. Intercontinental Low Bandwidth Without WAAS
Figure 3. Intercontinental Low Bandwidth with WAAS
Summary
The use of Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is recommended for optimizing the performance and bandwidth use of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 over a wide area network (WAN) as geographically deployments often face performance challenges due to network bandwidth and/or latency limitations.
With Cisco WAAS deployed across the WAN, IT teams can gain significant improvements in the network delivery of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as shown above.
