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Introducing the WANJet Appliance

Overview of the WANJet appliance

F5^® Networks WANJet^® appliance increases distributed application performance by optimizing, thus reducing, the amount of data that is transferred over the WAN. As a result, the WANJet appliance accelerates applications, such as file transfer, email, client-server applications, and data replication, resulting in increased performance for all WAN users.

Various WANJet hardware platforms are available for large, medium, and small corporations, data centers, and branch offices. Some platforms, such as the WANJet 500, can optimize over 20,000 connections. WANJet appliances feature fault tolerance, and work seamlessly across all wide-area networks, including dedicated links, frame relays, and satellite connections.

Operating at Layer 5 of the OSI reference model, the WANJet appliance can gather application knowledge, and analyze data streams to determine what data to optimize. The WANJet appliance combines several technologies to accomplish the optimization, including Transparent Data Reduction (TDR), adaptive TCP optimization, Application QoS, and site-to-site encryption.

TDR technology reduces the amount of bandwidth that repeated data transfers consume across a WAN link, and compresses the data. Adaptive TCP optimization enables the WANJet appliance to adapt, in real time, to the latency, packet loss, and congestion characteristics of WAN links, and then to accelerate application traffic. Application QoS policies let you assign more bandwidth to critical network traffic. The WANJet appliance uses SSL encryption to protect the traffic moving from site to site.

About this guide

This guide describes how to configure and use the WANJet appliance. Its intended audience consists of network administrators, information system engineers, and network managers responsible for the configuration and ongoing management of the WANJet appliance.

This guide provides information about:

Stylistic conventions in this guide

To help you easily identify and understand certain types of information, this document uses the following stylistic conventions.

Using the solution examples

All examples in this documentation use only private class IP addresses. When you set up the solutions we describe, you must use valid IP addresses suitable to your own network in place of our sample IP addresses.

Identifying new terms

When we first define a new term, the term is shown in bold italic text.

For example, after you have completed the hardware configuration, using either the LCD panel or a console connected to the F5 appliance's serial port, you can configure the WANJet appliance using the browser-based utility, called the Web UI.

Identifying references to objects, names, and commands

We apply bold formatting to a variety of items to help you easily pick them out of a block of text. These items include web addresses, IP addresses, utility names, most controls in the Web UI, and portions of commands, such as variables and keywords.

For example, if the IP address of the appliance is 192.168.168.102, type https://192.168.168.102:10000 in the web browser to log in to the WANJet appliance.

Identifying references to other documents

We use italic text to denote a reference to a specific section, or another document. In references where we provide the name of a book as well as a specific chapter or section in the book, we show the book name in bold, italic text, and the chapter/section name in italic text to help quickly differentiate the two.

For example, see Chapter 6, Reviewing Hardware Specifications, in the Platform Guide: WANJet^® 500 for details about the WANJet 500 appliance.

Identifying command syntax

We show actual, complete commands in bold Courier text. Note that we do not include the corresponding screen prompt, unless the command is shown in a figure that depicts an entire command line screen.

For example, the following command traces the route from the WANJet appliance you are working on to the device at IP address 10.1.102.204:

traceroute -v 10.1.102.204

Table 1.1 explains additional special conventions used in command line syntax.

Finding additional information and technical support

In addition to this guide, there are other sources of documentation that you can use to work with the WANJet appliance. The information is available in the guides and documents described below.

In addition to the documentation included with the platform, you can find additional technical documentation by using the following resources.