Wide-Area Network Optimization Controllers (WOCs)

What Does Wide-Area Network Optimization Controllers (WOCs) Mean?

Wide-area network optimization controllers (WOCs) are appliances that optimize the bandwidth of a wide-area network in order to improve end-user experience.

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They enable application centralization by reducing bandwidth costs and mitigating latency effects through network-level optimization, bandwidth reduction algorithms and various other protocol spoofing and optimization techniques used in the application layer that may compensate and help with lossy links.

Techopedia Explains Wide-Area Network Optimization Controllers (WOCs)

WOCs offer disk caching and compression to optimize the WAN link further by accounting for some known problems with common networking protocols such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS). WOCs are often used for inter-data center WAN links for supporting data replication being used for disaster recovery and business continuity requirements.

Current applications of WOCs are mainly on high-performance Array appliances and for Cloud and virtualized environments in order to accelerate data transfer and to improve performance of business-critical applications across wide area networks.

Benefits:

  • Improve application response times
  • Reduce the impact of network congestion, packet loss and latency
  • Compression of data to reduce data transfer sizes over the network
  • Improve TCP performance
  • Traffic shaping and SSL for securing, prioritizing and optimizing network traffic
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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…