WAN Accelerators Speed Up

A small but ambitious group of suppliers is tackling TCP/IP performance problems in wide-area networks (WANs). In the process, they're eyeing storage networks as prime prospects for their wares.

Leading the charge is Network Executive Software Inc. (NetEx), a spinoff of Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK). NetEx recently announced a WAN appliance geared specifically to speeding up storage traffic in WANs (see NetEx Hypers IP). The vendor also is rumored to be talking to one or more SAN suppliers about bundling its appliance with their gear.

NetEx may not be alone for long. Another WAN optimization player, Swan Labs Corp., is hoping to release versions of its Netcelera WAN optimizer appliance throughout 2005. According to CTO Youssri Helmy, the company hopes to start with an iSCSI storage traffic optimizer in the first quarter and follow it with optimizers for proprietary protocols from SAN vendors such as EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM).

"The WAN is the weakest link in a SAN," Helmy says. When storage traffic is sent over the WAN, he notes, throughput decreases exponentially as distance increases.

There are other vendors active in storage WAN optimization. Peribit Networks Inc. has joined a range of storage vendors' partner programs to ensure interoperability (see Peribit Partners With Veritas, Carrier Access Revises Outlook, and Peribit Joins EMC NAS Program). Riverbed Technology Inc. has long claimed improvement to storage traffic performance on WANs as a selling point for its appliances.Other WAN optimization players are starting to look twice at storage networking. An example is Orbital Data Corp., which has focused on a generic WAN traffic optimization. Spokesperson Lindsay Stewart-Scalisi says this in an email today: "While storage is not a key focus yet for Orbital Data, it is a market were closely tracking as it is such a natural fit for WAN optimization."

Each vendor claims its product is different, but there are similarities. All insist distance is not a factor in their ability to optimize traffic. All claim substantial performance improvements, by at least an order of magnitude.

There are plenty of differences to explore, however. One is data rate: NetEx and Swan Labs support rates to Sonet OC 12 (622 Mbit/s). Peribit offers rates to 20 Mbit/s. Riverbed will support rates to about 300 to 400 Mbit/s in a product scheduled for beta testing in January (ship date's in April).

Products also differ in the specific kinds of TCP supported: NetEx, for instance, claims to support iFCP, FCIP, and iSCSI as well as "regular" TCP/IP. Another difference lies in the level of application scrutiny the appliance can produce: Swan Labs says its products will be able to distinguish between various types of EMC's SRDF protocol.

Bottom line? The need for better WAN performance of storage traffic is driving a slew of new products, about which plenty of homework needs to be done.— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

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