Orbital Data Adds WAN Accleration Platform

Startup Orbital Data Corp. on Monday introduced a wide area network acceleration product line intended to allow for automatic optimization of data center infrastructures.

The Orbital 6000 series uses the company's Total Transport software to provide flow control, compression, service class policies, and Common Internet File System acceleration to allow increased WAN throughput and application response time, says Richard Pierce, chairman and chief executive.

"I like to characterize us as a group of repairmen," Pierce says. "When wide area network links are broken, we come in and provide solutions that repair those links and optimize their performance by either filling an empty link, compressing data, or caching data."

The Total Transport software includes an auto-optimization system to ensure the correct combination of WAN acceleration technologies is applied to specific data flows without operator intervention, and can be changed as conditions change, Pierce says.

The Orbital 6000 series includes the Orbital 6800 for data center deployment and the Orbital 6500 for branch offices. The two products can be used together to support up to 300 branch offices and WAN speeds of up to 500 Mbps. The platform can be deployed in three basic ways: fan-out from a data center to many remote offices; a mesh linking multiple data center and remote offices; and point-to-point connections.The products are available now. Orbital 6800 is priced starting at $21,000, and the Orbital 6500 at $5,000.