Definition - 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.
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.
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.
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