Network World’s Sevcik and Wetzel – a brilliant name for a vaudeville comedy duo if I ever heard one – have asked NW’s readers who were using Cisco’s WAAS to optimize their WAN to chime in on their experiences with the Cisco solution.

In the prologue, Peter Sevcik and Rebecca Wetzel , the principals of the boutique analyst firm, NetForecast, make sure to mention, in between trying to figure out the names of the Yankees baseball players, that:

“…any traditional measurement and management system that relies on packet capture, traffic counters, NetFlow data, or device utilization will be foiled.  Acceleration via caching or compression reduces WAN traffic and masks the payload of anything sent.  Cisco recognized this fact early and developed an exclusive relationship with NetQoS - a leading network performance management vendor - to overcome this problem.  When coupled with NetQoS, Cisco WAAS delivers one of the few ways to operate an effective ADS solution complete with all of the network management capabilities enterprises have grown to rely upon.” 

There’s some bias here, and I’m not just talking about how you’re reading a piece that says “NetQoS is awesome” on the NetQoS company blog. People who are likely to buy Cisco’s solution are probably already Cisco’s shops, and much like Nintendo/Playstation/Xbox or Nvidia/ATI fanboys – people cling to the brand they’ve purchased because they don’t like thinking that they made the wrong choice.

Even so, the comments on Network World have been, as of this post’s publication, unanimously positive. And because this is the NetQoS blog, we’d like to take the opportunity to point out how awesome the integrated solution is. (Also, we’re universally loved by children and puppies that have complex network performance management needs).

“The Cisco WAAS solution we picked gave us additional ease-of-operations and management advantages, because of its transparent integration with our WAN QoS, Security, VoIP, and monitoring services. We can continue to use these services with the visibility we need, the saying "you can't manage if you can't see" definitely applies to us.” -- Jeff Gill and Hugh Barnett, A&I Team, Michael Baker Corporation

There’s also this quote from a District Manager of a Cisco VAR:

“A handful of customers have opted to "proof of concept" the technology on "representative" locations, and they have all shown massive reductions in traffic (lowest was 30%, highest was 84%). These PoCs led directly to large purchases.”

It’s important, to be able to prove and quantify reductions in traffic – not just in these “proof of concept” scenarios, but in justifying the IT budget for WAN optimization to the people that sign the checks.

“We started testing early in beta with the Cisco WAE…. The thing that we found that the WAE stood out from the rest was the transparency. [Other solutions] both natted the packets across the WAN where Cisco did not. This was integral in our deployment time since it did not affect our current security posture.”

Because of the way that WAN optimization breaks the TCP/IP stream, it makes network visibility more difficult and requires network monitoring devices on both sides of a connection – having integrated monitoring in the WAAS device means there isn’t an additional deployment (or cost) associated with retaining visibility.

Feel free to leave a comment below telling us how awesome (or less-than-awesome, if that’s your opinion) we are.