As businesses increasingly move to “the cloud,” unfamiliar terms appear. One of these terms is “cloud acceleration.”
In order to better understand cloud and IP acceleration, let’s first
look at a similar concept: content delivery networks (Source: IP Acceleration by Aryaka).
A content delivery network, or CDN, is a large network of servers
located around the world designed to distribute content to users in a
highly efficient, fast manner. For example, popular websites and blogs
with users located around the globe need a fast and efficient way to
deliver content – even if users are located tens of thousands of miles
away. Since the time it takes to deliver data between a server and an
end user is influenced by geographic differences, having servers located
in data centers around the world can bridge those distances and improve
performance and availability. Each server contains its own cached
version of the content and can quickly deliver it to local users.
Cloud acceleration has a similar goal: to deliver content to end
users as quickly as possible. While content delivery networks can do
this, they are generally limited to delivering static content such as
webpages, images, and videos. It is not practical for CDNs to deliver
constantly changing content such software as a service (SAAS),
cloud-based applications, and SharePoint data. With dynamic data, a
content delivery network can’t keep up with the changes.
Instead of relying on a distributed system of servers, cloud
acceleration improves dynamic content delivery by improving the
efficiency of the delivery path upon which the data must travel between
the IP source and the end-user. A form of IP acceleration is used to
decrease duplicate data within the transmission. By optimizing the TCP
protocol and eliminating duplication within the transmission, the
dynamic content can move more quickly through the path to and from the
end user.
