WAN Optimization Inches On

1:00 AM -- No good deed goes unpunished. Recent news shows there's room for improvement in wide area file services (WAFS) and WAN optimization, despite a slew of product introductions.

Case in point: Packeteer has incorporated its Mobiliti client (a file acceleration tool formerly from Tacit) in the same software package with SkyX, which boosts TCP/IP applications. The vendor also has upgraded its SkyX Accelerator 750 with the ability to optimize data on Sonet OC-12 connections at rates to 622 Mbit/s. (See Packeteer Integrates SkyX, Mobiliti and Packeteer Delivers Backup.)

Good news for sure. It is nearly a year since Packeteer bought WAFS vendor Tacit for $78 million. (See Packeteer Picks Tacit.) And it's less than six months since the vendor acknowledged the difficulties caused by the integration of Tacit into its lineup. (See Packeteer's WAFS Wobble.) This should help.

But support for 622 Mbit/s isn't the same as support for 1 Gbit/s, an increasingly favored link in corporate networks.

No worries. Packeteer plans a new SkyX hardware platform for 1-Gbit/s for release within the next 18 months. Meanwhile, "622 is still a huge improvement," a spokesman says.News of partnerships with 3PAR and HP come from Riverbed, which also continues to publish encouraging news about its financial status. (See Riverbed Flows Toward Profitability, HP, Riverbed Strike Deal, and 3PAR, Riverbed Deliver DR.) Nonetheless, customers are still tied to the vendor's appliances, despite support for a software-only client, since the client software does not permit data segments to be shared across multiple users.

Blue Coat is also planning news of a partnership program for video-on-demand software providers. A couple of these have already put the Blue Coat interface onto their video processing software, in order to optimize HTTP video links in corporate networks. The bad news is that Blue Coat still does not support NFS.

Despite the downsides, there's little doubt that WAFS and WAN optimization are in demand. Examples include the $17 million funding garnered by newcomer Silver Peak Systems last month. (See Silver Peak Pockets $17M.) And recent data from Infonetics shows the WAN optimization market grew 23 percent between the last two quarters of 2006 and showed an overall gain of 37 percent between 2005 and 2006.

Bottom line? There's room for improvement -- and support for competitive solutions. Bring 'em on!

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch