A customer’s Wide-Area Network (WAN) is the foundation of their globally connected enterprise, enabling collaboration, communication, business productivity, and risk mitigation. The performance of their WAN is critical to everything customers do. With Riverbed WAN Optimization solutions, their business runs faster and more efficiently, delivering consistent service levels and cutting the costs of their IT infrastructure.
The Riverbed WAN optimization solution can change the way your business works by improving and accelerating application performance across the WAN. Using WAN optimization, IT can provide LAN-like access to data and applications throughout the enterprise — anytime, anywhere. It’s the only solution to.
pan mobile workers, branch offices, and data centers, allowing your distributed workforce to collaborate in real time. And it does all this while streamlining operations, improving visibility, and reducing the costs of IT infrastructure.

Cluster technologies are becoming increasingly important to ensure service offerings meet the requirements of the enterprise. Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 support three cluster technologies to provide high availability, reliability and scalability. These technologies are: NLB, CLB and Server cluster. These technologies have a specific purpose and are designed to meet different requirements.
   • Server cluster provides failover support for applications and services that require high availability, scalability and reliability, and is ideally suited for back-end applications and services, such as database servers.Server cluster can use various combinations of active and passive
   • NLB provides failover support for IP-based applications and services that require high scalability and availability, and is ideally suited for Web tier and front-end services. NLB clusters can use multiple adapters and different broadcast methods to assist in the load balancing of TCP, UDP and GRE traffic requests.
   • Component Load Balancing provides dynamic load balancing of middle-tier application components that use COM+ and is ideally suited for application servers. CLB clusters use two clusters. The routing cluster can be configured as a routing list on the front-end Web servers or as separate servers that run Server cluster.

Cluster technologies by themselves are not enough to ensure that high availability goals can be met. Multiple physical locations may be necessary to guard against natural disasters and other events that may cause complete service outage. Effective processes and procedures, in addition to good architecture, are the keys to high availability.