Troubleshooting guide

REVIEW DRAFT—CISCO CONFIDENTIAL
1-20
Cisco Wide Area Application Services Configuration Guide
OL-26579-01
Chapter 1 Introduction to Cisco WAAS
Overview of the WAAS Interfaces
Autodiscovery of WAAS Devices
Cisco WAAS includes an autodiscovery feature that enables WAEs to automatically locate peer WAEs
on your network. After autodiscovering a peer device, the WAEs can terminate and separate the
LAN-to-WAN TCP connections and add a buffering layer to resolve the differing speeds. Once a WAE
establishes a connection to a peer WAE, the two devices can establish an optimized link for TCP traffic,
or pass the traffic through as unoptimized.
The autodiscovery of peer WAAS devices is achieved using proprietary TCP options. These TCP options
are only recognized and understood by WAAS devices and are ignored by non-WAAS devices.
Centralized Network Monitoring and Management
Cisco WAAS Web-based management tools (WAAS Central Manager and WAE Device Manager GUIs)
enable IT administrators to centrally define, monitor, and manage policies for each WAAS device, such
as usage quota, backups, disaster recovery, restores, access control, and security policies. IT
administrators can also perform the following tasks:
• Remotely provision, configure, and monitor each WAAS device or device group.
• Optimize system performance and utilization with comprehensive statistics, logs, and reporting.
• Perform troubleshooting tasks using tools such as SNMP-based monitoring, traps and alerts, and
debug modes.
IT administrators benefit from the following features of Cisco WAAS:
• Native protocol support—Provides complete end-to-end support for the underlying file system
protocol (Windows/CIFS) used by the enterprise. Security, concurrency, and coherency are
preserved between each client and file server.
• Transparency—Is fully transparent to applications, file systems, and protocols, enabling seamless
integration with existing network infrastructures, including mixed environments. Cisco WAAS also
has no impact on any security technology currently deployed.
• Branch office data protection—Increases data protection at branch offices. Its file cache appears on
the office’s LAN in the same way as a local file server. End users can map their personal document
folders onto the file cache using Windows or UNIX utilities. A cached copy of user data is stored
locally in the branch WAE for fast access. The master copy is stored centrally in the well-protected
data center.
• Centralized backup—Consolidates data across the extended enterprise into a data center, which
makes it easy to apply centralized storage management procedures to branch office data. Backup and
restore operations become simpler, faster, and more reliable than when the data was decentralized.
In the event of data loss, backup files exist in the data center and can be quickly accessed for
recovery purposes. The amount of data loss is reduced because of the increased frequency of
backups performed on the centralized storage in the data center. This centralized storage backup
makes disaster recovery much more efficient and economical than working with standalone file
servers or NAS appliances.
• Simplified storage management—Migrates storage from remote locations to a central data facility,
which reduces costs and simplifies storage management for the extended enterprise.
• WAN adaptation—Provides remote users with near-LAN access to files located at the data center.
WAAS uses a proprietary protocol that optimizes the way traffic is forwarded between the WAEs.