Filter
Top Products
WAN Acceleration Overview
1270
SonicOS 5.8.1 Administrator Guide
What is WAN Acceleration?
The SonicWALL WXA series appliances deployed in one-arm mode with SonicWALL NSA/TZ
series appliances allow network administrators to accelerate WAN traffic using Transmission
Control Protocol (TCP) and Windows File Sharing (WFS) between a data center and a remote
site. In this type of deployment, the SonicWALL NSA/TZ series appliance provides dynamic
security services, such as attack prevention, Virtual Private Network (VPN), routing, and Web
Content Filtering. Without WAN Acceleration, WAN connections like T1/E1 or xDSL typically
have a round trip time of between 25ms and 100 ms, causing some applications to perform
poorly. The WAN Acceleration service can increase application performance more effectively.
Figure 1 illustrates the basic network topology for the SonicWALL WXA series appliances and
the SonicWALL NSA/TZ series appliances.
Figure 1 NSA/TZ and WXA
Transmission Control Protocol Acceleration Overview
Most modern networks are sending an increasing number of files and data sets over the WAN,
reducing the amount of available bandwidth.TCP Acceleration is a process that decreases the
amount of data passing through the WAN by sending a reference index instead of the actual
data and breaking long end-to-end TCP connections into several smaller TCP connections.
These TCP Acceleration features work together to increase network throughput.
The SonicWALL WXA series appliances utilize TCP Acceleration by accelerating selected
traffic passing between a local data center and a remote site. The selected traffic is replaced in
the SonicWALL WXA series appliances’ shared databases as blocks of data with reference
indexes. A complete data set needs to be sent the first time before TCP Acceleration can take
place; each SonicWALL WXA series appliance needs to have matching data stored.
Internet
PC
PC
PC
Remote Site
Data Center
WXA series
appliance
NSA/TZ series
appliance
NSA/TZ series
appliance
WXA series
appliance
Domain
Controller
Switch
Switch
File
Server
Email
Server
Web
Server