Many large organizations have resorted to operating multiple data centers in order to ensure globally consistent application performance. Many have now discovered that data center consolidation can be a reality if they can accelerate applications across the wide-area network (WAN).

In the past, the idea of data center consolidation to support distributed workforces was not feasible: IT teams needed build and maintain multiple data centers, as well as constantly maintain, monitor, patch, upgrade, and mirror all of the data centers in order to achieve acceptable application performance. Multiple data centers also slowed the rollout of new applications. Each data center required its own implementation of the application and additional pre-launch testing to ensure the applications worked according to specifications.

Aside from all the additional capital costs and labor that these data centers require, data centers that are not consolidated can create havoc on data consistency and performance. Users may still have difficulty collaborating if they need to access a file in a distant data center via the WAN and application performance is not optimized. If users are accessing the same file at the same time in different data centers, there may be data consistency errors. Finally, regulatory compliance is much more difficult to achieve when data centers are not consolidated.

Using a wide-area data services solution, enterprises can accelerate applications and effectively enable consolidation of global or regional data centers. Riverbed's solution can significantly accelerate the performance of most important applications over the WAN, and at the same time reduce WAN bandwidth utilization. When applications are accelerated over the WAN, geographic proximity of the user to the data center is no longer as important, so data center consolidation becomes a reality.

Consolidated data centers combined with accelerated applications provides organizations with the best of both worlds. Users get fast application performance and the assurance that they are working with the correct data; IT managers can simplify their data center infrastructure and the labor required to maintain it.

Of course organizations may still require a backup data center for disaster recovery. Riverbed can also help organizations accelerate data backup and replication faster among data centers.