Haseeb Budhani's blog

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:

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:

Big Data is hot. A number of startups have been funded to explore Big Data opportunities. Even Oracle recently announced its entry into the Big Data ring.

Giants such as Oracle and EMC don’t enter a new category unless they can sell their solutions to large enterprises and make obscene profits. In return for all the money that enterprises pay out for these solutions, they expect them to scale and be highly available.

I had the privilege of participating in a debate-style session titled “What are the Next Steps for WAN Optimization?” at Interop earlier this week. Jim Metzler, an independent industry analyst, hosted the event and kept the other panelists and me on our toes. A very engaged and tech-savvy audience enriched the discussion through relevant questions.

The way the debate played out, plus my subsequent conversations with some folks from the audience, underscored two key points:

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:

I used to love watching “A” Team reruns when I was a kid. I always loved how the team would design some ingenious contraptions using “off the shelf” items and take down much larger opponents. My favorite part in every episode was when Hannibal Smith would light up a cigar towards the end and say: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Our in-field trials are progressing extremely well, and we are successfully proving our performance claims in customer environments. The sales team is keeping us all extremely busy with customer meetings and the interest level is rising steadily.

If you have any specific queries for any of us here at Infineta, please feel free to drop me an email (haseeb at infineta dot com) and I’ll be happy to get your question(s) addressed.

I love it when a plan comes together. :-)

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.