ITWorx Eliminates Tunnel Traffic

WAN appliance vendor ITWorx is working to shore up what it considers the weakest link of data transfer -- high latency that slows transfer rates regardless of bandwidth capacity.

ITWorx next week will announce a SpeedArray acceleration feature on its Netcelera 1.5 WAN appliance. ITWorx CEO Youssri Helmy claims the new technology can accelerate bulk data transfers over a WAN by more than 100 times, enabling global disaster recovery and other business-critical applications.

SpeedArray is based on patent-pending technology that overcomes limitations of TCP caused by high latency. It uses multiple parallel tunnels to transfer on one stream, reducing the dependency on one connection and increasing maximum throughput. By spreading the data stream over multiple WAN tunnels, SpeedArray allows one tunnel to move data while the other waits for TCP.

Geoff Barrall, CTO of enterprise NAS vendor BlueArc Corp., claims SpeedArray solves one of the common obstacles to efficient replication and data recovery.

SpeedArray allows you to run multiple streams in parallel, and each stream uses a different section of the bandwidth,” Barrall says. “We’re seeing more and more demand for data replication and disaster recovery. A lot of customers want to replicate.”BlueArc entered a partnership with ItWorx and is recommending NetCelera 1.5 for use with its NAS servers. Customers need at least two NetCelera appliances, one sitting on each end of every WAN link.

Helmy claims SpeedArray improves transfer rates of compressed files by 15 times and accelerates bulk data files more than a hundred-fold, giving NetCelera a huge edge over competing products from Expand Networks Inc., Peribit Networks Inc., and Packateer.

“Four times is the fastest anybody else gives you on a good day,” he says. “We’re establishing a new benchmark in WAN performance.”

SpeedArray will ship as a free upgrade to NetCelera customers. NetCelera, first released in February, ranges in price from $2,500 for a box with a 64-kbit/s link to $45,000 for a 45-Mbit/s connection.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch