SonicWALL WXA 500 Live CD
Significantly enhanced WAN performance and user experience

Overview:

Significantly enhanced WAN performance and user experience

In today's distributed enterprise, applications such as Microsoft® SharePoint and Windows® File Sharing transmit an increasing number of files and data sets over Wide Area Networks (WANs), overburdening available WAN bandwidth. To make matters worse, such collaboration applications can inefficiently retransmit entire files (rather than just incremental changes) multiple times, unnecessarily increasing WAN traffic. IT often responds by expending budget on more bandwidth or enhanced services. Alternatively, WAN acceleration technology can resolve the problem by allowing more efficient utilization of the existing network bandwidth.

The SonicWALL® WAN Acceleration Appliance (WXA) Series reduces application latency and conserves bandwidth, significantly enhancing WAN application performance and user experience for small- to medium-sized organizations with remote and branch offices. After initial data transfer, the WXA Series dramatically reduces all subsequent traffic by transmitting only new or changed data across the network. The WXA de-duplicates data traversing the WAN, thus reducing application latency and conserving bandwidth. Other acceleration features include data caching, metadata caching and data-in-flight compression.

The WXA Series is comprised of the WXA 500 Live CD, WXA 2000 and WXA 4000 hardware appliances, and WXA 5000 Virtual Appliance. Unlike standalone WAN acceleration products, WXA solutions are integrated add-ons to SonicWALL E-Class Network Security Appliance (NSA), NSA and TZ Series appliances that are deployed as Next-Generation Firewalls. This integrated solution streamlines the placement, deployment, configuration, routing, management and integration of WXA with other components, such as VPNs. When deployed in conjunction with SonicWALL Application Intelligence and Control Service, the WXA offers the unique combined benefit of both prioritizing application traffic (using QoS or bandwidth management) and minimizing traffic between sites, resulting in optimal network performance.

Features & Benefits:

• Simplified deployment through complete provisioning and configuration by a SonicWALL firewall drastically reduces the complexity of deploying, routing and integrating multiple WXA appliances across the network.
• Increased security using SonicWALL Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection™ technology provides an additional layer of security by scanning all traffic and data for threats before sending it to the WAN acceleration appliance.
• Protocol optimization provides LAN-like application performance for users accessing resources over the WAN by decreasing the latency and chattiness presented by inefficient protocols or application communication.
• Byte caching and file caching reduce bandwidth consumption by orders of magnitude, extending the life of existing WAN links and providing a better user experience.
• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) arrives through increased efficiency and overall utilization of existing WAN bandwidth, which in turn avoids costly and unnecessary WAN upgrades.
• Data compression across the WAN increases performance and reduces latency.
• Windows File Sharing (WFS) acceleration helps improve response times while decreasing the amount of data transferred when downloading or accessing files from a shared drive.
• Visualization delivers real-time insight into the performance gains obtained by introducing WAN acceleration into the network.

Deployment Scenarios:

Specifications:

¹ Maximum users may vary depending on the number of flows being generated per user.
² WFS Acceleration is available only when the Live CD image is installed on the provided hardware.
³ The virtual appliance hardware outlined above supports approximately 120 users with 600 flows. Max users and flows for the Virtual Appliance may vary depending on the provided hardware configuration.

Documentation:

SonicWALL WXA Series Data Sheet (.PDF)