Replication

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:

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:

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.

Let me start off with some great news: We officially began demonstrating our solution’s capabilities to partners and customers last week. [A huge round of applause for our developers and QA engineers for a phenomenal achievement!]

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:

Next month, Infineta Systems goes to New York City for the fall networking show, Interop. Our CEO will participate in a panel there on Oct. 21st – and maybe buy us some FDNY caps in Times Square. We’ll be meeting with some of the largest financial institutions in the world while we’re in town. Why is this an important trip for us? Let me explain.

Orbital Data, a WAN Optimization company I used to work at a while back, holds the distinction of being the first company to assert that “transparency” is a critical feature for acceleration solutions. Back then, Orbital Data and others in the WAN Optimization space were focused on the branch WAN, and not on the inter-data center WAN, but my old boss was definitely on the right track in terms of what matters to network engineers.

Cool, our corporate blog just made its debut since you’re reading it! Welcome to Cardinal Directions.

You don’t walk into a room full of strangers and start talking about your life story in rich detail. Similarly, I’ll save you from the shockwave of having to listen to too much in this, our initial encounter. So, let’s jump into the basics …

Here at Infineta Systems, we’re sticklers for solving very big problems. It’s not that small(er) problems aren’t interesting. As a newbie startup, we can only aim our complete resources on a concentration of some pretty big problems.