Mobile boom creates network speed bumps

“It’s highly likely your workloads were not designed to work” in a virtualised environment. “They are all designed to sit in the one data centre like they have for the past 50 years. You have to completely rebuild them or use this technology,” Hackney says.

Accelerating the cloud

The same issues in accelerating applications in infrastructure-as-a- service are even harder to resolve with software-as-a-service. For example, Riverbed’s technology only works when its software or hardware is running at the source and the destination.

Some SaaS providers such as Salesforce.com refuse to have network optimisation devices in their data centres, but vendors haven’t stopped trying to find ways around this. To give customers faster access to Salesforce.com and the like Riverbed has placed its Cloud Steelhead “within a millisecond or two” of SaaS providers’ data centres.

Amazon offers customers an optimisation service that loads an instance of Steelhead which is paid for on a time and usage model. The price for Amazon’s optimisation service is too high for SMEs though, Raper says.

Raper indicated that other cloud providers would roll out similar services in the near future. Network optimisation was a strong concern for cloud providers because “the biggest impediment they have is performance”. “Whattheycan’tget is performance on the network at the right price.”

Riverbed is also in talks with global content mirroring service Akamai to install its appliances in its data centres, which sit very close to the data centres of the major SaaS providers. The deal, due in the first quarter of 2012, will effectively give the vendor the ability to boost all the traffic from SaaS providers that passes through Akamai’s servers.

Akamai has not announced how it will charge for the service or what it will cost. Competitor Blue Coat has released its Cloud Caching Engine to tackle the issue of improving performance for SaaS applications.

The device sits in a branch office and accelerates cloud content by caching regularly accessed data from the SaaS application.

The vendor sold one device to a company which had discovered its staff had been avoiding updating Salesforce.com because it was taking too long to load pages on Salesforce.com’s website.