Following the discussion about WAN Governance economic impact, let's see now its Yin aspect: resources optimization, which is basically doing more with less.
Two main resources can be optimized: network and servers.
The most classical source of Network savings is bandwidth reduction. Wan optimization allows data compression between sites, with average reduction factors that span between 2 and 10 according to the type of traffic. This data reduction requires a device on datacenters and branch offices, which may not be appropriate to all cases.
Another way to save network resources is to provide a much better use of the available bandwidth by applications. Autonomic networking enables global optimization that can reach an extra load factor of 1.5 to 3 with equipments on datacenters only. Additional techniques like Rightsizing network accesses according to application SLA will provide extra reduction with total confidence in the results.
Then the enterprise has two options: 1) reduce its bandwidth to the minimum 2) or simply keep same bandwidth and postpone further upgrades. We must say that we see in general the second option (postponing upgrades for an extra 2 to 4 years) with bandwidth reduction on a few selected sites only; but all depends on traffic inflation, network price, etc.
Installing Wan optimization appliances on 20% of a 350 sites network and activating global optimization to the entire network can provide a 3-year network savings between 3 M€ and 6 M€ (with bandwidth needs doubling and bandwidth price reducing of 30% during the 3-year period).
On the other hand, Application acceleration allows enterprise to consolidate servers in a few datacenters, sparing remote servers Capex and Opex. All depends on the enterprise organization and application delivery scheme, of course.
If we assume that one server will be progressively removed (over 12 months) in 50 branch offices of the previously described network (the one that are equipped) we'll get a 600+ k€ savings over the 3-year period.
If a full ball of wool can go through a needle hole, why not application flows through a limited bandwidth network?
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