Blue Coat SG210-5-M5 firewall (hardware) Datasheet

Solution Brief: MACH5 Acceleration Technology

Blue Coat solutions overcome network limitations to optimize application delivery to users across the distributed organization.

Users and their data continue to move farther apart.

Sometimes the driver is server consolidation, leaving branch and remote offices with poor performance. Other times, the driver is the growth of data itself, data that must be backed-up, served out and distributed. For all these reasons and more, WAN performance has become a critical choke point in successfully delivering applications to the users that need them.

Each organization’s challenge is different, however.

Poor file service performance, excessive Internet backhaul, slow SSL encrypted software-as-service applications, growing video use and an inability to use thick-client applications over a WAN are but some of the most common problems. Unfortunately, the traditional approach to solving all of them – more bandwidth – is ineffective, because most networks are now bound by a more fundamental limitation: latency.

In response, many IT organizations have begun to evaluate specialized solutions that can accelerate application delivery by overcoming latency and expanding throughput.

However, many of these solutions address only part of the overall mix of challenges. A comprehensive solution should support all key enterprise business applications

– regardless of whether they are webified, rich media or plain text, hosted internally or externally, or encrypted or unencrypted. Ideally, such a solution should make decisions based on the user, not just the application or source server. In addition, it is important to consider support for future WAN architectures – for example, a mix of MPLS with direct-to-Internet branch office connectivity.

Blue Coat’s Application Acceleration

Solution with MACH5 Technology

Enables Organizations to:

Accelerate Business Applications

-> With MACH5, enterprises can accelerate all key business applications – file, e-mail, web, video, secure web

(HTTPS), while maintaining complete control over non-business applications (e.g., P2P, IM, Skype) and unwanted network traffic (Spyware, inappropriate Web content, malicious traffic).

Enable Server Consolidation

-> MACH5 acceleration technology helps centralized applications work, allowing organizations to consolidate applications to meet cost and compliance requirements, and still maintain application performance.

Accelerate Encrypted Applications

-> More and more applications are being “webified,” and many of those are hosted (or partially hosted) outside the enterprise. This often means that HTTPS/SSL is a greater portion of overall traffic. Blue Coat’s MACH5 technology can accelerate this encrypted traffic – even when the application is hosted/owned by a third party.

Accelerate Backup and Business Continuity

-> Data at rest has been growing faster than network throughput, making it hard to complete backups and meet continuity and recovery objectives. MACH5 overcomes the effects of latency, expands throughput and assigns resources to ensure backups get done on time – or that applications are usable in the event of an emergency.

Accelerate Video and other Rich Content

-> For cost and compliance reasons, more and more organizations are turning to multimedia training

(streaming/live video, or video on demand), delivered over enterprise networks. Blue Coat’s MACH5 technology accelerates these applications, and minimizes network impact.

Accelerate To The Desktop

-> Users roam to networks outside of your control.

The SG Client with MACH5 technology provides for a seamless, predictable user experience, even as the underlying network changes. SG Client provides MACH5 accelerated applications directly to the end user, wherever they may be.

The Blue Coat Solution

Blue Coat’s acceleration solution, featuring MACH5

(Multiprotocol Accelerated Caching Hierarchy) technology, enables organizations to accelerate delivery of all key productivity applications – including file services, email/Exchange, Web applications, video, and SSL encrypted web applications. MACH5 encompasses five acceleration techniques that work in concert – Bandwidth

Management, Protocol Optimization, Object Caching, Byte

Caching, and Compression. Combined, these technologies enable more solutions to common networking challenges than competing approaches and return control of the

WAN back to the business.

Solution Brief: MACH5 Acceleration Technology

Bandwidth Management/Traffic Shaping

This technique assigns a priority to a particular type of application. This priority has an effect both on the order the traffic is sent in, and in the amount of guaranteed bandwidth the application is allocated, regardless of other traffic on the network. This technique ensures that the network is available for the highest priority traffic.

Likewise, less important applications can be throttled back and assigned limited bandwidth to help ease network congestion.

Protocol Optimization

Protocol optimization takes protocols that are inefficient over the WAN (e.g., CIFS, MAPI, HTTP, TCP, HTTPS) and makes them more efficient – typically by converting a time-consuming serial communication process into a more efficient parallel process where many communication tasks are handled simultaneously. There are a variety of other optimization techniques, depending on the protocol (e.g., TCP session reuse). While protocol optimization does not reduce the amount of bandwidth an application consumes, it can greatly accelerate delivery of applications and reduce latency in the process.

Byte Caching

Byte caching is as it sounds – caching of repetitive patterns in the byte stream. Byte caching observes repetitive patterns in application traffic, symbolizes those patterns with a token, and sends the token in lieu of the bulky traffic. These tokens are typically only a byte or two, but symbolize blocks of data as large as 64KB. Byte caching is typically not application-specific, and operates at a lower level, optimizing all TCP traffic.

Object Caching

Object caching is very different than byte caching – it is protocol/application specific, and is an all-or-nothing affair. If the cache contains the object, the user is immediately served the object from a local store – virtually eliminating latency and WAN bandwidth consumption. If the cache does not contain the object (or contains an outdated version of the object), then for that particular transaction, a new object must be reloaded into cache and the performance gains are realized the next time the object is requested.

Compression

Inline compression can reduce predictable patterns even on the first pass, making it an ideal complement to byte caching technology.

With MACH5, all of these techniques work together to optimize application delivery to remote locations. For example, if the object cache contains an outdated copy of a document, the byte caching capability has patterns and tokens that require only the tokens, plus the changes to be sent. What little is sent is then compressed, and protocol optimized (reducing bandwidth consumed and latency/round trips). All of this is prioritized according to the enterprise’s preferences, using bandwidth management, such that the important applications get through first with the bandwidth they need.

By combining these technologies into a single solution,

Blue Coat MACH5 gives organizations the complete toolkit they need to optimize their entire WAN, covering more application types with more technologies than any other optimization solution.

Blue Coat Systems, Inc. 1.866.30.BCOAT // 408.220.2200

Direct

// 408.220.2250

Fax

// www.bluecoat.com

Copyright © 2007 Blue Coat Systems, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced by any means nor translated to any electronic medium without the written consent of Blue Coat Systems, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. Information contained in this document is believed to be accurate and reliable, however, Blue Coat Systems, Inc. assumes no responsibility for its use, Blue Coat is a registered trademark of Blue Coat Systems, Inc. in the U.S. and worldwide. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners. v.SB-MACH5v5-1007