Hi Mark,
The change log is quite long but here are the key points:
General:
Linux kernel and modules were updated to more recent versions. This was needed to run on more recent top end servers.
We have bumped the click version to the latest.
Compression Engine:
The code was rewritten from scratch. All in all this was a risky change, but I think the benefit is going to be huge. On one client submitted replication sample of about 1.5GB, the reduction increased from 3.3X to 5.7X. We are optimistically hopeful that the change will make the Wanos cold compression very close to the likes of Silver-Peak and Riverbed. At least definitely on some types of data. We have also made the compression level configurable.
The figure above depends on the packet loss recovery and packet order correction, which is in alpha stage. It works perfectly in the lab, but needs some final refinement to be perfectly robust in production. We can enable this from the command line if your team is interested in testing. I am hoping that we can get this feature in an early beta stage for 2.0.1 in two weeks time.
Encapsulation:
Due to the some changes in Cisco IPsec VPN's dropping IPComp traffic without a trace, we have added optional GRE encapsulation and made the UDP encap which has proven useful, available in the GUI. Also the UDPEncap has been changed to provide IP layer transparency so that this feature is compatible with WANs with ACL filters based on the client/server ip addresses.
GUI:
Some minor improvements in the GUI has been made. The most important one is that WAN Rx stats is now also available, where previously only Tx info was available.
The optimization graphs has also been changed to make it easier to see the optimization difference between LAN and WAN.
Added appliance shutdown option
Time settings.
Gui bugs fixed:
Missing mask on destination subnet in a traffic policy.
Invalid gateway address validation check.
Multithreading:
Some changes were made to improve on the dedup multithreading in a multisite context.
Disk IO:
Dedup improvements in disk IO that made a 10-15% increase in TCP throughput.
What we are in the process of completing or integrating:
Another level of improved compression ratio.
Packet loss recovery - Fail safe methods.
WAN Health indicators: RTT, Packet loss and Out of order.
Out of path via PBR
HTTP Cache.
Short term wishlist:
Single NIC bridge for devices like the Intel NUC. E.g. to bridge two vlans on a single trunk interface.
Out of path tunnel mode for simpler cloud deployments.