As the need for disaster recovery, geographically separated clusters, multiple datacenter locations, and features like business continuity services become more commonplace, the issues of datacenter interconnection over WAN links becomes progressively more critical. WAN bandwidth is expensive, and the more bandwidth you need, the more you need to find ways to optimize the use of that bandwidth. Idle bandwidth is a waste of money and oversubscribed bandwidth means that some application isn’t getting the service it needs to operate most efficiently, which impacts the way users can get their jobs done.
This is the problem that Infineta is addressing with their Data Mobility Switch, a WAN optimization device that allows the datacenter to get the most out of their WAN links, optimizing traffic flow, providing Quality of Service (QoS) control and able to operate at 10Gbps wire speeds. Infineta claims that the DMS offers instant bandwidth capacity gains of five to ten times greater when compared to that what is currently being achieved on a network WAN link without a DMS unit.
The key to these bandwidth claims are twofold; very granular QoS controls which give applications the bandwidth they contract for, only when that bandwidth is needed, and Infineta’s hardware data deduplication technology, the Velocity Dedupe Engine (VDE). These two features are the backbone of their performance claims, which uses the supposition that you are noyt currently getting the best possible performance from your WAN links and that properly optimizing the existing high speed connections will result in the same throughput as if you invested in even more expensive faster WAN connections. By guaranteeing minimum data rates for applications which are latency sensitive the DMS can deliver the same performance through a 622Mbps OC12 that would otherwise require a 3Gbps WAN link. On an OC48 link, running at 2.54Gbps, Infineta claims to be able to deliver a WAN connection that is effectively the same as a 10 Gbps link, as long as applications meet the criteria that the vendor has determined best shows the optimized link.
Whether they are delivering a 10Gbps Wan connection or not, the aneed to optimize WAN interconnections is one that users dealing with multiple physical connections deal with every day, and Infineta is delivering a solution well worth evaluation.
