SCIENCE

Infineta Systems announced the general availability of its groundbreaking product, the Infineta Data Mobility Switch (DMS). The DMS provides instant 5-10x bandwidth capacity gains, IP traffic acceleration, and critical application prioritization and assurance over multi-gigabit WAN links (the Hyper-scale WAN). The DMS is the technology industry's first-of-a-kind solution to operate at 10Gbps wire speeds, supporting the next generation of advanced data center architectures that leverage key innovations around agile, high performance compute, server, and storage services delivery models.

"Supporting massive volumes of inter-data center traffic generated by critical applications such as replication requires large WAN connections, often spanning significant distances," said Joe Skorupa, research vice president of data center transformation and security, Gartner. "Moving large amounts of traffic over a high capacity WAN can be expensive and consuming, increasing the importance of high-speed data reduction and transport optimization."

The Infineta DMS combines fine-grained QoS (quality of service) controls, advanced network layer acceleration technologies and the Velocity Dedupe Engine (VDE) - the first-ever, hardware-based data deduplication ("dedupe") system core - to deliver maximum throughput for high capacity WANs. With the DMS, for example, customers can easily turn a 1Gbps WAN into a virtual 5Gbps link. Because the DMS can be configured to guarantee minimum data rates for individual classes of service, customers can carve out "protected circuits" for their bandwidth intensive, latency sensitive applications over their existing WAN links. Similarly, an OC12 (622Mbps) circuit can be turned into a 3Gbps link, and an OC48 (2.54Gbps) circuit into a 10Gbps link.

The end result for customers is increased network throughput and guaranteed bandwidth availability. Enormous traffic growth can be supported without requiring any WAN upgrades, leading to significant savings in both CAPEX (WAN equipment upgrades) and OPEX (incremental bandwidth costs). Not only is the DMS able to significantly improve the performance of all high-speed traffic traversing Hyper-scale WANs, it is also a financially sound investment, with a typical return on investment in a sub-year timeframe.

"We have seen just about every imaginable component sitting at the ends of large WAN links get remodeled to be more powerful and less costly but customers are still forced to glue it together using yesterday's very expensive, inefficient connection - raw bandwidth," remarked Denis Martin, CTO, Navisite. "Having seen what it can do first hand, the Infineta DMS will make your current inter-data center WAN link feel like a dial-up modem."

"We're growing rapidly and the data we need to support our operations is growing even faster," said Alexei Rodriguez, VP of Operations, Proofpoint. "Products like the Infineta DMS enable the cost-effective and reliable movement of that data across our data center infrastructure at a scale that others can't match. I've been very impressed with what I've seen."

The First Generation of WAN Optimization Solutions
Over the last decade, the combination of IT consolidation and end user dispersion has led to a situation where the distance separating users from application servers became a major pain point. User dissatisfaction and plummeting productivity were further exacerbated by the fact that the underlying protocols used by a majority of enterprise applications were never intended to run over limited bandwidth, high latency WANs. A number of software-based WAN optimization appliances entered the market to address this application responsiveness problem faced by branch users.