If your company has multiple offices and your site-to-site connections are painfully slow, Cantarus can help using world-leading Riverbed technology.

WAN optimisation can transform the performance of site-to-site connections using basic business broadband without the significant expenditure associated with increasing line speeds.  Equally, it can be used to further enhance the gains available with such expenditure.

The principle is very simple.  A dedicated WAN optimisation appliance sits at the end of each Internet connection in the WAN and all inter-site communications pass through these appliances.  When a user requests a file from a remote site, the remote applicance accesses the file on the server, compresses it and sends it to the local appliance.  This step alone can offer enormous performance gains as common files such as Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel documents frequently compress by 90% or more.  However, this is just the start.

The local appliance now caches the file and passes a copy to the user.  Of course, the locally cached copy means anyone else opening the same file will not need to download it from the server again.  The original user has already seen a big performance gain on opening the file, but saving the file can take even longer.  However, when the save is initiated the local appliance compares the new version to the cached version and uploads only the changes to the remote appliance.  The remote appliances then combines the original file with the changes and commits the save to the remote server.  All this is totally seamless and transparent to the user and applications on the network.