Cisco introduced an appliance Tuesday that lets IT administrators better manage and protect data in their remote offices.
Cisco introduced an appliance Tuesday that lets IT administrators better manage and protect data in their remote offices.
The Cisco File Engine Series is an appliance the company acquired from Actona Technologies last August that enables file server consolidation, file sharing and data protection.
“Trying to manage the growth of data and protect it in an office that typically doesn’t have any local IT resources is not only complex, but also very expensive,” says John Henze, director of marketing for the Caching Services Business Unit for Cisco. “Enterprises are becoming more distributed; there are dozens and hundreds of offices in Fortune 1000 companies.”
IDC, in fact, estimates that as much as 60% of a company’s data resides outside its centrally managed data center servers, creating islands of storage, each with its own infrastructure and no IT resources to support it.
“Wide-area file services for remote offices are a growing market opportunity. If you want to save on local deployments of file and print servers and storage, plus associated maintenance costs, appliances such as Cisco’s are a good fit,” says Stephanie Balaouras, senior analyst at the Yankee Group.
A Cisco File Engine appliance would be located in each branch office and would replace traditional file-and-print servers and low-end network-attached storage devices. The appliance would stream files in real-time to another appliance located in the data center. When users save files, the files are cached on the File Engine and then transferred to data center storage where they can be backed up.
Greg Bosworth, manager of information technologies for Watertown, Mass.-based engineering firm Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, acquired three appliances from Actona for use in his remote offices.
“We’ve had a longstanding issue of work sharing between offices – we have project files that span multiple offices,” says Bosworth. “We continually had to copy data from one location to another where it could be worked on. With the File Engine we eliminate that problem and know that the files we are looking at are always up to date.”
Bosworth evaluated not only Cisco’s File Engine, but also software-based products and those from Tacit Networks. He has just ordered 15 more File Engines for his network.
The Cisco File Engine employs a technology called wide area file services (WAFS), which overcomes the latency of file transfers over WAN connections. For data to be transmitted from a branch office to the data center, files need to be broken into individual packets, and the applications and storage systems need to verify that the transmission was successful, thus adding latency to the network.
WAFS technology isn’t being proposed by Cisco alone. Companies such as Novell and start-ups Tacit Networks and DiskSites have appliances that use WAFS. Novell and DiskSites rely on file synchronization rather than proxy caching; Tacit and Cisco both deploy proxy caching.
Tacit’s and Cisco’s appliances are the most similar – they’re different from other vendors that are offering just file compression or some other type of WAN optimization, says Balaouras. “The appliances handle file caching and consistency.”
The Cisco File Engine supports both Microsoft’s Common Internet File System (CIFS) and the Unix/Linux Network File System (NFS). It contains two 40G-byte Serial ATA drives for local caching of files.
The Cisco File Engine Series is available now. It costs $12,000 for an appliance and licenses for as many as 50 branch-office users. Additional 50-user license packs are $4,500.
