Start-up Aryaka Launches Cloud-Based Application Acceleration And WAN Optimization Service

Coming out of stealth mode this week, Aryaka Networks has launched an application acceleration and WAN optimization solution that runs in the cloud. The Aryaka platform is designed to be an alternative to hardware and software-based network optimization solutions, such as those offered by Akamai, Blue Coat, Citrix, Cisco, Riverbed, Blue Coat  and others. The company characterizes their service as "Riverbed meets Akamai."

The startup was founded in Nov. 2008 by Aryaka president and CEO Ajit Gupta. Ashwath Nagaraj, the company's VP of engineering, has been working on a solution that would provide WAN acceleration capabilities without hardware. Aryaka Platform is being billed as a software-as-a-service approach to bandwidth optimization and WAN acceleration, with connectivity included. The solution consists of numerous points of presence (POPs) around the world, with a pay-as-you-go pricing model with no capital expenditures or maintenance fees and around-the-clock support.

Aryaka says it delivers a guaranteed 99.99 percent network uptime. A Web-based portal with dashboards built in lets organizations view their network performance and availability metrics as well as set and receive real-time data alerts based on performance and availability of applications and geographic locations.

To build out its network, Aryaka buys connections in countries from carriers. Currently, Aryaka has 10 POPs worldwide (in Europe, Asia and the U.S.) and says it will add another 15 by year's end. If the branch office has a low-bandwidth connection to the POP, or the POP is further away, increasing latencies, the company can install an appliance--at no cost--that supports TCP optimization to boost performance of that initial segment. Of course, adding appliances at branch offices means the service is no longer a truly cloud-based offering and begins to look more like a managed service from a telco or other service provider.

Aryaka says the POPs will be located in large metro areas and will be designed so that customers can experience a 10-millisecond or smaller latency in their connections. Aryaka will continue to add POPs over time, as required by customers, to meet that same latency. If any of the POPs ever have problems, redundant POPs allow for fail-over.With Aryaka's service, compression is done on the network, rather than in hardware installed at organization's main headquarters. But Aryaka says most of its WAN optimization is gleaned from various techniques occurring between the POPs. For example, the company says it leverages a patent-pending technology that accelerates specific applications (such as CIFS, FTP, and others) over the network and reduces the impact of latency and chatty protocols. It also uses its own TCP optimization, with proprietary techniques and TCP window scaling, to improve the throughput over the network. Aryaka plans to add firewall,  URL filtering and remote VPN as value-added services.

Rebecca Wetzel, networking consultant with NetForecast, an engineering consulting firm, says Aryaka's idea of performing WAN optimization as a service is not entirely new, but the company has taken the idea further than others. "What they are doing is somewhat unique," she says. For example, Virtela is offering a cloud-based application acceleration service, but Wetzel says the architecture is built using off-the-shelf equipment. "The difference with Aryaka is it has been built from the ground up as a cloud-based service with multi-tenancy support." Wetzel also points to Akamai's 2007 acquisition of Netli in order to offer managed services for accelerating online applications, but adds that service is not part of Akamai's core business and is only somewhat similar to what Aryaka is offering.

In addition to unveiling its Aryaka Platform, the company announced that it has raised $14 million, including Series A funding from Trinity Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Stanford University.