NetEx announced a new accelerator that the company says can speed up storage applications across wide-area networks (WANs) by a factor of 10.
The five-year-old StorageTek spin-off says its new throughput standard eliminates the need for expensive and complex networking equipment while solving throughput issues associated with business-class WAN (define) connections using protocols such as TCP (define), FCIP, iSCSI, iFCP and FTP.
"Organizations seeking greater efficiency and additional IT cost containment should add NetEx to their short list," says Greg Schulz, senior analyst at the Evaluator Group. "The capability to aggregate IP-based storage applications, running them at OC12 speeds concurrently, should solve WAN degradation issues, and the reduction of required WAN hardware and maintenance costs is attractive."
NetEx calls its new Hyper Powered IP "the simplest and highest-performing WAN platform for accelerating the broadest range of storage applications in the industry," including EMC SRDF Adaptive Copy and SRDF/A, Veritas Volume Replicator and NetBackup, NetApp SnapMirror and SnapVault, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and associated applications such as Oracle DB RSync, Microsoft Exchange and others.
Hyper Powered IP leverages common IP networks while enabling high-speed connections up to OC12 — as much as a 1,000 percent increase in throughput for many applications. The new standard works with or replaces existing high-speed storage transport products using NetEx's IP acceleration technology, an appliance-based configuration that attaches to an existing network infrastructure and requires no changes to server and storage controllers, applications or network devices.
"Hyper Powered IP represents an order of magnitude improvement over antiquated ESCON-over-IP, slower FCIP solutions and inefficient TCP/IP," states Robert MacIntyre, NetEx's vice president for business development and marketing. "Because specialized and dedicated equipment is not needed in the Hyper Powered IP configuration, there is less hardware to purchase and maintain, eliminating not only additional infrastructure investment but also greatly reducing the cost of dedicated network management."
TCP delivers poor bandwidth utilization for most storage applications because of packet loss, and the problem gets worse as distance increases, resulting in much lower WAN throughput performance, NetEx says. With Hyper Powered IP, users can maximize performance while minimizing costs associated with traditional TCP/IP WAN configurations, and with only one storage application fabric to manage, a Hyper Powered IP network provides simpler implementation, operation and management.
"Packet loss is an inescapable issue wherever glass meets metal," says Marc Staimer, founder of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "The result of this loss is greatly reduced efficiency which no amount of compression will solve. Hyper Powered IP's solution ... allows storage applications to function over the WAN at an incredible pace."
Hyper Powered IP replaces dedicated Fibre Channel switches for E-Port extension to
FCIP or iFCP storage routers, which require a separate management system and trained end-user staff.
NetEx says Hyper Powered IP combines improved compression with latency and packet loss mitigation technologies. The solution automatically compresses data, ranging from 2:1 to 15:1, depending on the information being compressed, and aggregates the data blocks to the HyperIP-accelerated pipe. The technology "shields" the data from intermittent network variations, thus mitigating or eliminating missed critical data transfer windows or the need to restart critical data transfers.
HyperIP replaces the Fibre Channel appliances within a WAN and connects to any 10/100/1000 Ethernet switch. It is transparent to application, TCP and network infrastructure, appearing as a gateway to servers or storage controllers.
NetEx says Hyper Powered IP scales to meet throughput requirements, and customers pay only for the throughput they need. Pricing starts at about $20,000.
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