Cisco Systems NAM, 5 manual Understanding Waas, Contact information for the device

Chapter 2 Setting Up The NAM Traffic Analyzer

Traffic

Table 2-10 Device System Information Dialog Box (continued)

Field	Description
Contact	Contact information for the device.
SNMP read from device	SNMP read test result. For the local device only.

If the device is sending NetFlow Version 9 (V9) and the NAM has received the NDE templates, then a V9 Templates button appears below the Device System Information window.

Note NetFlow v9 templates do not appear in all NDE packets. When there are no templates, the V9 Templates button does not appear.

WAAS

Understanding WAAS

Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software optimizes the performance of TCP-based applications operating in a wide area network (WAN) environment and preserves and strengthens branch security. The WAAS solution consists of a set of devices called Wide Area Application Engines (WAEs) that work together to optimize WAN traffic over your network.

When client and server applications attempt to communicate with each other, the network devices intercept and redirect this traffic to the WAEs to act on behalf of the client application and the destination server.

WAEs provide information about packet streams traversing through both LAN and WAN interfaces of WAAS WAEs. Traffic of interest can include specific servers and types of transaction being exported. NAM processes the data exported from the WAAS and performs application response time calculations and enters the data into reports you set up.

The WAEs examine the traffic and use built-in application policies to determine whether to optimize the traffic or allow it to pass through your network not optimized.

You can use the WAAS Top Talkers Detail Dashboard to analyze the traffic for optimization. See Top Talkers Detail, page 3-17for more information.

Cisco WAAS helps enterprises to meet the following objectives:

•Provide branch office employees with LAN-like access to information and applications across a geographically distributed network.

•Migrate application and file servers from branch offices into centrally managed data centers.

•Minimize unnecessary WAN bandwidth consumption through the use of advanced compression algorithms.

•Provide print services to branch office users. WAAS allows you to configure a WAE as a print server so you do not need to deploy a dedicated system to fulfill print requests.

•Improve application performance over the WAN by addressing the following common issues:

–Low data rates (constrained bandwidth)

–Slow delivery of frames (high network latency)

–Higher rates of packet loss (low reliability)

	User Guide for the Cisco Network Analysis Module (NAM) Traffic Analyzer, 5.0
OL-22617-01		2-29