WAN & Latency Issues

[pingu]

Hi,

We have a 3Mbps Ethernet/MPLS WAN circuit between our London and LA offices. Whilst this works nicely for small files the distance between the sites means that we have pretty high latency (~150ms) on the connection. This makes transferring any larger files very painful, particularly when there’s a client waiting. We work in advertising and therefore have to regularly shift both large PSDs and video files back and forth between the two offices.

We have implemented the obvious solutions such as using FTP rather than AFP, but we are really mostly limited by TCP and latency. So we are now looking into other ways to work around the latency. One thing that comes up is the possibility of using UDP in place of TCP and I have found a few software/hardware solutions that boast the ability to greatly speed up transfers. Does anyone have any experience of the following products or have any others that they could recommend to us?

[url=http://www.digital-rapids.com/Products/IndividualProducts/Copper.aspx]Digital Rapids Copper[/url]

[url=http://niwotnetworks.com/gbx/]Niwot Networks Gigabit Express[/url]

[url=http://www.riverbed.com/products/appliances/]Riverbed Steelhead Appliances[/url]

Any input greatly appreciated

Cheers
Dan[url][/url][url][/url]

[pingu]

Thanks Joel,

Our main problem is that we have a large number of users sending data to a smaller number of servers. I believe that if I need to change sysctl settings I have to do this at each machine, is this right?

Won’t this also affect though the way in which they interact with our other internal servers or with other parties external FTP servers etc?

Cheers
Dan

[pingu]

Cheers Joel 🙂 That’s what I thought…

Any recommendations? I only mentioned the Steelhead one as it was the first up when googling…

D

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