Monday, July 20 marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. To commemorate the historic event, Blue Coat Systems set up a WAN optimization deployment that would solve the issue of what might happen if an astronaut on the moon had to access a computer file on earth.
The average distance from the moon to the Earth is 238,857 miles (384,403 km), and a computer session between the two would comprise the longest Wide Area Network (WAN) connection in the…solar system.
Even today, WAN connections between terrestrial locations on Earth are under fire for the amount of time it takes for a person in a branch office to access a file or centralized application in a company’s headquarters or data center. Larger files may take minutes or tens of minutes to access from as little as a thousand miles away.
WAN optimization sprang up as a solution to address the slow response times for people located some distance from where computer files (Word, Excel, Power Point, data files, etc.) and applications are stored. What may have previously required two or three minutes might be reduced to three or four seconds.
Speeding up remote applications or file access to the moon puts the WAN optimization problem in a whole new universe. Instead several thousand miles apart, the distance is perhaps two orders of magnitude greater.
In tests run by Blue Coat Systems, a 2.5 megabyte file from a location on earth required 5 minutes and 12 seconds (312 seconds) to download on the moon. With a Blue Coat ProxySG appliance for WAN optimization, the same file could be downloaded in as little as 11 seconds, a 96 percent reduction in time required to transmit a file.
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About Blue Coat Systems
Blue Coat Systems is the technology leader in Application Delivery Networking. Blue Coat offers an Application Delivery Network Infrastructure that provides the visibility, acceleration and security required to optimize and secure the flow of information to any user, on any network, anywhere. This application intelligence enables enterprises to tightly align network investments with business requirements, speed decision making and secure business applications for long-term competitive advantage. For additional information, please visit www.bluecoat.com.