* Riverbed endorsed by HP, Renovator Award finalist
WAN acceleration technologies have advanced beyond speeding application traffic to include wide-area file services, which make work sharing across distributed locations easier.
Companies such as Riverbed, Tacit, FineGround and Cisco have introduced products that help IT managers better distribute load across WANs.
This week HP is expected to announce at its StorageWorks user conference a product using Riverbed’s wide-area file services technology. HP will put Riverbed’s WAN acceleration technology, currently available in Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, to use in its StorageWorks EFS WAN Accelerator, which is built on HP ProLiant servers.
Network World Renovator Award finalist Erik Durand can attest to the technology’s capabilities.
The corporate network manager at Psomas, a civil engineering firm headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., this year started working with Riverbed appliances to make work sharing possible for 14 locations. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances – installed since the end of January – sit on either end of a WAN link between a router and a core switch, and intercept traffic flowing between clients and servers. With computer-aided design (CAD) files at 500M bytes each, Durand says the WAN couldn’t handle real-time transfers.
Steelhead devices improved the response time, he says. Steelhead appliances have knowledge of Microsoft’s Common Internet File System and Network File System for Unix and Linux that lets them predict the response a server or a client needs and to produce it locally rather than getting it from across the WAN. The devices also cache patterns of traffic as it flows across the WAN. The next time one of the patterns appears, these appliances call out the cached version rather than tapping the server for it, reducing the latency of WAN roundtrips. The boxes also optimize TCP sessions among themselves to make transfers more efficient.
Durand says the appliances have helped engineers across offices work on the same files without duplicating efforts.
“With Riverbed, we could enable engineers to share their data in near-LAN time,” Durand says.
