How To Guides > Accelerate File Transfers (SMB/CIFS) > Services

Manage optimization services

The Exinda optimization technology enables applications to run faster over the WAN. Latency in the network affects user productivity and satisfaction with their applications and network. Latency can be due to the sheer volume of data that must be returned for the given application as well as contention for the available bandwidth, the distance that the data must travel while the user is waiting for the data to be retrieved, including the number of back-and-forth communications of "chatty" applications, and failures of the data delivery requiring the data to be retransmitted .

The Network Orchestrator appliance uses a variety of techniques to address these issues. The appliance can reduce the amount of data transmitted over the WAN by using de-duplication, compression, and caching techniques. The appliance can minimize delays associated with waiting for the data to be returned by reducing the chattiness of particular protocols and by anticipating requests for data and pre-fetching the data. The appliance can also reduce the frequency of data delivery failures so that data does not have to be retransmitted.

These techniques are provided by the following acceleration services:

Universal Acceleration

Exinda Community – Provides appliance auto-discovery and acceleration capability services between all Exinda appliances in the WAN. To learn more, read How Appliance Discovery Works.
WAN Memory – Provides data reduction using de-duplication and compression technology.

Protocol-specific Acceleration

TCP Acceleration – Provides layer 4 (TCP) protocol optimization.

The TCP protocol can be optimized by establishing a protocol tunnel to avoid subsequent 3-way TCP handshake chattiness and ensuring that the tunnel is kept alive. TCP Acceleration also allows the administrator to set the TCP receive window size to optimize the amount of data in flight given the environment characteristics and to set congestion control algorithms to best match the environment. TCP Acceleration will also reduce chattiness and the amount of data on the wire by acknowledging the receipt of packets in batches instead of acknowledging each packet individually. TCP Acceleration also notifies ECN-aware (Explicit Congestion Notification) routers without dropping packets.
SSL Acceleration – Provides acceleration for SSL encrypted connections.

SSL Acceleration provides acceleration of SSL encrypted TCP sessions by intercepting SSL connections to configured servers and decrypting them, performing acceleration techniques, then re-encrypting them again. Only traffic to servers that are explicitly configured is SSL accelerated. Any SSL traffic that the Exinda appliance sees that does not belong to a configured server is ignored.
SMB Acceleration – Provides layer 7 SMB1 and SMB2 (Windows File Sharing) protocol optimization.

SMB (Server Message Block),operates as an application-layer network protocol used for providing shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. May also be known as CIFS (Common Internet File System), where CIFS is a dialect of the SMB protocol.

SMB Acceleration is the file transfer specific component of the Exinda Application Acceleration Technology. To deal with inefficiencies in the SMB protocol, the Exinda appliance has several optimizations to improve the performance of applications using this protocol in the 6.4.1 release, including reading ahead of the data stream, writing behind the data stream, and caching meta data on files and folders.
NCP Acceleration – Provides layer 7 NCP (NetWare Core Protocol over TCP port 524) protocol optimization.

NCP is used in some products from Novell. NCP is used to access file, print, directory, clock synchronization, messaging, remove command execution, and other network service functions in these Novell products.

Data caching

Edge Cache – Provides acceleration of static web content such as HTML, GIF, JPEG, ZIP, RAR, ISO as well as dynamic content including YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo.

	Note The Acceleration feature (including universal & protocol-specific acceleration) is licensed separately. Edge Cache is also licensed separately. Please contact your local Exinda representative if you wish to enable either of these features.

Note

The Acceleration feature (including universal & protocol-specific acceleration) is licensed separately. Edge Cache is also licensed separately. Please contact your local Exinda representative if you wish to enable either of these features.

The Manage Optimization Services dialog allows you to start, stop, and disable the optimization services running on the Exinda appliance. Ensure that the service that you need is running.

	Caution If a service is disabled, any concurrently accelerated connections remain untouched, that is acceleration continues, whereas any new connections are not be able to use the service. When a service is stopped, all accelerated connections (new and concurrent) stop using the service immediately. Stopping services like SMB, TCP, and WAN Memory might cause a failure in currently accelerated connections requiring them to be re-established.

Caution

If a service is disabled, any concurrently accelerated connections remain untouched, that is acceleration continues, whereas any new connections are not be able to use the service. When a service is stopped, all accelerated connections (new and concurrent) stop using the service immediately. Stopping services like SMB, TCP, and WAN Memory might cause a failure in currently accelerated connections requiring them to be re-established.