Acceleration

As I read the successive (and so incredibly well written!) blogs about Infineta’s presentation at Networking Field Day # 3, its clear why people seem to be avidly reading these deeply technical blogs, but hate to read white papers from industry analysts.

As Ashwath mentioned in his blog a few days ago, we were scheduled to present to Tech Field Day delegates yesterday (March 29). The event was streamed live from our site, and snippets of the presentations will be made available on the same page within a few days.

In looking through the Twitter feed for #NFD3 yesterday, I saw some quotable and humorous quotes that I’m reproducing below:

Big Data implementations such as Hadoop are becoming more common, and as they do, organizations are discovering that Big Data drives Big Traffic. Ashish Shah has written a great piece on this subject, available here:  Wikibon.

Over the next five years, machine-to-machine traffic between data centers (over Data Center Interconnects, or DCIs) is expected to increase faster than traffic within data centers, forcing organizations to respond by implementing multiple 10 Gbps WAN links. In most cases, however, simply scaling up the WAN infrastructure is a weak long-term strategy. Instead, keeping pace with DCI traffic requires a new class of WAN optimization technologies that can scale to 10Gbps speeds while introducing minimum latency to the end-to-end workflow.

You are a key member of a network team managing a critical set of data centers, and are constantly dealing with replication, backup or virtualization related issues across the WAN. You would like to learn more about WAN optimization but simply don’t have time for some slick sales guy to come in and talk about “the importance of WAN optimization solution agility” or “how you can accelerate ALL your applications.” You just want something that addresses the inter-data center WAN issues you are dealing with today and want to ask very specific questions without all the “So when will you have budget for this project?” pressure.

If you live in the SF Bay Area, there are two awesome shows that Infineta will be participating in, where our technical experts will be present to answer all your questions. The events are:

Two common ways of gauging DMS performance are the reduction rate, which looks at the data handled by the DMS, and throughput, which looks at the WAN link on which the data is carried.  There is a third way to measure DMS performance, however, and that is to look at the impact the DMS has on endpoint performance.  We call this the compound effect, and although it is perhaps the most telling measure of performance, it is often overlooked. The compound effect is simply the product of the reduction rate and the throughput increase.  

Let’s say after deploying the DMS you consistently observe reduction rates of 5x. Not bad! End of story, right?  No.

Before each customer deployment, our sales engineers work with the customer to fill out what we call a “Pre-site Survey,” where we collect information such as network diagrams, deployment and security concerns and any application-specific gotchas. Naturally, the most important metric we discuss with customers is their criteria for success, and we make sure that we “sell” the solution in terms of the outcomes that the customer is interested in.

In a recent customer discussion, the customer shared the following information:

Don MacVittie, a former editor for a major IT industry publication, currently manages technical marketing initiatives at F5 Networks. My colleagues and I are regular readers of Don’s informative, timely, and (quite frankly) enjoyable articles.

Don recently wrote a piece on F5’s DevCentral site, in which he compared deduplication and compression, two data reduction technologies used by WAN optimization solutions, and how they are complementary. I presented similar content to our field guys back in October of 2010, and as we typically do, we recorded the session and shared it for the world to see. The video is linked below:

Recently, I had the opportunity to pitch our inter-data center WAN acceleration solution to the crème-de-la-crème of the Internet networking community a few weeks ago. These are the guys who run the infrastructure for household names in e-commerce, social networking, SaaS, and mobile ad platforms. Many of these folks buy bulk bandwidth (in a few cases, in the 10s of lambdas) for their larger data centers and, for these specific cases, will not expect to benefit in any significant way fromour solution’s data reduction capabilities.

Having been in the WAN acceleration business for some time, I’ve heard all sorts of outlandish claims from vendors that eventually make their way into the ears of customers, some of which are downright inexplicable. In a recent customer conversation, when we mentioned that we should be able to maintain an average reduction ratio in the 5-7X (80-86%) range for their replication traffic, a gentleman on the other side of the table reminded me that a certain WAN Optimization company promises 40X+ deduplication. I hear such wild claims all the time. Unfortunately, this misleading data is so pervasive that customers are beginning to believe it too.

If the workflow you are trying to accelerate is high-speed replication, consider the following: