If you talk enterprise IT then it can be said that open source products have always found a place in it. It is seen that engineers and administrators normally obtain these tools around in their production systems. It cannot be denied that the Network Management System (NMS) has been reshaped by alternatives. Not a long time before if people wanted to taste truly robust monitoring solution then they had to spend serious amount of cash. This was the case even if they only wanted to have a few of the features that the big names included in their packages. But today the scenario has changed. Nowadays there are robust wan optimization open source options for IT pros that provide key capabilities for which they do not have to pay the cost of commercial software. The importance of optimization today: In every business exists a need for Wide-Area-Network optimization and acceleration. It is a complex and expensive process but a required investment. But the same functionality can be obtained with these tools without burning your pocket. Now businesses can attain substantial performance and improvements in usability leveraging QoS, caching proxies and compression that are available in various wan optimization open source tools that the top providers are offering. It is not wise to jump straight to commercial WAFS solution as you will have to pay hefty amounts and moreover, you might not even need features like WAFS. And not to mention the architectural limitations of WAFS are bound to pose a setback for your plans. The use of FreeBSD or Linux for QoS and queuing: To make a congested Wide-Area-Network link usable prioritization plays a big part. More so, if the Wide-Area-Network link is traversed by VoIP traffic. In order to employ effective QoS and traffic shaping or queuing, now there are Linux and BSD family of operating systems. Now, the aspect of prioritizing comes in when the kennel has to decide which traffic to allow through when some if it is queuing. Things often get very complex in no time when configuring QoS. There are a variety of methods for classifying and queuing traffic and also for how to stall or kill non-priority traffic. It is also possible to deploy a firewall that has traffic shaping so that VoIP works all the time, internal application web browsing gets priority over internet web browsing and proper consideration is given to whatever other critical traffic one may have. More control with caching proxies: Even to internal servers, web traffic can be drastically controlled with the use of HTTP proxy. You can locally cache images and other large items by using standard Squid or Vamish proxy servers. Every time a user clicks, instead of using the Wide-Area-Network link to fetch images on remote web and application servers, the content is served from the local cache. Best providers will install the software into some spare servers and your staff can feel the benefits of Wide-Area-Network optimization at low costs. That will obviously increase efficiency to a great extent. Read more- http://wanos.co/wan-optimization/