The area of WAN (wide area network) optimisation is fast becoming a key issue for Irish CIOs alongside security and convergence, according to a senior executive at Peribit Networks.
Speaking to ComputerScope as the company was launching its new integrated WAN optimisation architecture called PeriSphere, Shane Buckley, international president, Peribit Networks, said that the strategic imperative to reduce IT costs, consolidate infrastructure and centralise to one or two data centres has created new issues in relation to deploying applications over distributed networks.
‘What this release is primarily about is seeing the WAN optimisation market emerge for the wilderness,’ said Buckley. ‘It would have taken a lot of forward thinking for IT professionals to have considered taking on a technology like this two or three years ago.’
Buckley points to research by Gartner predicting that 75 per cent of enterprises worldwide will have invested in WAN optimisation systems by 2008 as their primary WAN upgrade priority.
Thanks to IT infrastructure consolidation and centralisation there are greater numbers of instances where employees are no longer in LAN proximity to their servers. ‘As you have fewer clients on a LAN, data traffic has to go on the WAN.
As the distance between servers and clients is much greater, performance suffers.’
There are also issues of conflict between application demands and how to balance out application priorities that makes agreeing an SLA a difficult process, he added.
The release of the new PeriSphere architecture, which is the company’s fifth release in over two years, aims to bring together a wide variety of functions to enable network managers to deliver more LAN-quality application delivery over a distributed network. Elements of the PeriSphere architecture include compression, sequence caching, latency reduction, bandwidth management, path
optimisation and visibility tools.
One of the newer elements of the new WAN optimisation suite is SRS 5.0, which can improve application performance on links with high latency and packet loss. It can also create alternative paths for data traffic in a network, such as across a
frame relay or other WAN connections as well as the public Internet using the Policy-Based Multipath function.
Buckley cites the example of entertainment giant Vivendi, which has a global VPN connection and which uses Peribit technology to deploy JD Edwards ERP application across the global network—something that wasn’t previously possible.
Ireland represents a ‘tremendous market opportunity’ for Peribit Networks in the form of the new release as there is a high percentage of IT and pharmaceutical companies based here, including many US firms with European regional headquarters, said Buckley, who added that as much as 25 percent of Peribit’s UK
and Ireland revenues combined came from Ireland. PeriSphere is expected to be released on the Irish market in a few weeks time.
16/08/04</p>
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers