Thursday, May 19, 2011

The cost of high bandwidth WAN connections combined with the reality of limitations in speed, regardless of cost, cripples the data center’s ability to meet key business demands. The only solution is to get more out of current WAN connections. This means that the WAN needs to be optimized as much as possible. As a result interest in WAN optimization is at an all time high. The problem is that most WAN vendors specialize in just one aspect of the above use cases. There are WAN optimizers for remote offices, different ones for users, different ones for storage and now new ones that specialize in server virtualization. What is needed is a simple cost effective solution family that can cover all of the WAN optimization location types that the data center has. This is the goal of the Certeon family of solutions.

The Certeon product suite includes solutions that can be delivered as turnkey hardware appliances, virtual appliances, stand alone servers or as a client on Windows desktops and laptops. Each of the members of this product suite can solve a specific problem or meet a certain implementation criteria that the data center has. The aCelera Virtual Appliance and aCelera VA Hardware are designed to provide data center to data center or remote office to data center connectivity. The virtual appliance is as a virtual machine in a virtual infrastructure so deployment can be as simple as a software download. The hardware version is ideal for offices that don't have a virtual infrastructure. It also includes its own hypervisor which means the hardware appliance can be used to consolidate typical remote office functions. There is also a special version of the aCelera virtual appliance, "aCelera Sync Virtual Appliance", which is a more cost effective version of the software focused directly on the storage or backup replication markets. It is tuned specifically for these high bandwidth streaming applications. Finally there is also a version of the software designed to run on a standrd Windows 2008 R2 server. This allows an existing server in a remote office to be used without having to deploy a specific appliance or implement a virtual infrastructure. Finally there is the aCelera client that is designed to be installed on the mobile laptop or home office desktop. It can work with Windows XP and Windows 7. All of these versions of the products can be managed from a single console and provide WAN optimization for each of the use cases.

Certeon optimizes the WAN in a multi-step process. The first step is to provide optimizations to TCP itself, in essence to make sure that the WAN pipe is filled up as much as possible. In addition to TCP optimization Certeon also does protocol specific optimization to eliminate unneeded round trips and eliminating protocol "chattiness". The next step is to use data compression to make sure that all data is reduced in the bandwidth it needs the first time it goes across the WAN. The next step is deduplication for when data has been sent across the WAN previously. Here Certeon uses analyzed data in large segments for better performance. While smaller segments may discover more data redundancy it requires extra processing and potentially WAN latency. Larger segments provide an optimal balance of redundancy identification and performance. Redundant data, once identified, does not need to be transferred again across the WAN. Certeon also gains a deduplication advantage because all of the data comparisons can be done across the above product family to a common storage pool. This increases the likelihood that data is already in the WAN cache and will not need to be retransmitted. Finally they also use application aware deduplication for more exacting results.

Storage Swiss Take

WAN optimization is becoming a universal problem across all sizes of data centers, it is no longer the sole domain of the very large data center. The granularity of product selections that Certeon brings to its customers is well suited for this expanding market. Certeon's simplicity plus technology advantages, especially in areas of deduplication, make it a strong consideration for data centers of all sizes.

George Crump, Senior Analyst