One of the choices you will have to make when setting up a SharePoint architecture where you have geopgraphically dispersed locations is the decision between a "centralized farm setup" or "multiple farms setups" in different geopgraphic locations. If you choose for multiple farm setups you might want to take look at georeplication. I already talked about georeplication in SharePoint a couple of weeks ago but sometimes it is just more cost efficient to do a central deployment. This will however imply that you will have sufficient network bandwidth so that you end-users in remote locations can still work efficiently.
So when you are faced with limited bandwith you want to use it as efficiently as possible. There are some different solutions out there to do network acceleration for SharePoint:
- Citrix Wanscaler and Netscaler - WAN optimization of MOSS Trafic with Citrix Netscaler and WANScaler . This is a new product offering which Citrix acquired earlier from Orbital Data.
- Packeteer (Tacit) - http://www.packeteer.com/products
- IOra - http://www.iora.com/products/sharepoint.asp
- Certeon - http://www.certeon.com - has some interesting technology which understands patterns of packets from specific applications such as SharePoint.
- Cisco - check out their white paper - Cisco WAAS Software 4.0 optimizations for SharePoint (written for SPS2003 but the same principles will apply)
- F5 - http://www.f5.com - traditionally aimed at AFEs (application front end) to boost performance but now it will move into the WAN optimization area as well, where it will encounter traditional players such as Riverbed and Silver Peak
Other links:
- Microsoft SharePoint could be a challenge for WAN optimization.
- WAN optimization market overview
- WAN optimization and acceleration appliances tackle SSL trafic
- The next three big WAN optimization targets
