* Start-up Orbital Data debuts with WAN optimizer
Orbital Data, a start-up in Foster City, Calif., this month will mark its debut by unveiling products intended to speed applications through technology that allows for bandwidth maximization.
The company claims the products will work better than the caching and compression technologies used by other WAN optimization equipment vendors.
The flagship Orbital 550 (formerly called IP Express) is a rack-mountable appliance that addresses high-speed connections and data transfers over WANs.
Orbital Data says a slimmed-down version of the Orbital 550 (formerly called IP Express LC) accelerates the file transfers from a single local host and can run at speeds up to 8M bit/sec to another Orbital Data-equipped site.
By contrast, the full-version Orbital 550 can accelerate every host at a customer site, and can run at hundreds of megabits per second. The appliance is placed on either side of a WAN connection and uses network monitoring and flow-control algorithms to maintain the desired connection speed, regardless of latency and retransmit rates. The appliance does this, Orbital Data says, by setting the connection bandwidth speed for current link conditions. And the company says its technology is capable of dealing with packet loss intelligently, “avoiding delays, timeouts and unnecessary retransmissions.”
The Orbital 550 also lets customers mix accelerated and non-accelerated traffic on the same WAN. The company says, “accelerated traffic has precedence, and its performance is exactly the same, regardless of how much non-accelerated traffic is present.” Orbital Data says this feature eliminates the need for a dedicated network for critical traffic, a money- and time-saver for network managers.
Both versions are available now, ranging in price from $10,000 to $50,000. Orbital Data says that in addition to these products, it will develop others that deal with digital asset management and disaster recovery.
