Wednesday, July 13, 2011

For example, branch WANs typically handle user-to-machine traffic, with a low capacity, higher latency profile. There may be thousands of connections in the hundreds of Kbps range, producing steady, lower speed data flows generated by applications like email, file access and ERP, for example. The Hyper-scale WAN sees machine-to-machine traffic with a high capacity/low latency profile. While the number of connections could be as small as a few hundred, each connection could potentially scale to the Gbps+ range depending on the use case, and is likely to be “bursty” in nature. Infineta’s Data Mobility Switch (DMS) is designed to handle this entirely different kind of traffic that’s flowing between data centers.

Storage Switzerland covered this technology in a post this past November. Now Infineta has made the Data Mobility Switch generally available. The DMS is a purpose-built device, not proprietary software running on a commodity x86, as most other WAN optimization solutions are. The DMS can maintain 1Gbps rates per connection, and can fully saturate a 10Gbit WAN segment with as few as 10 connections. The DMS can do this because its architecture is fully distributed, processing packets for each data stream independently, in an FPGA, instead of in software running on a server CPU. This processing includes network deduplication, carried out in a hardware sub-system that Infineta calls the Velocity Dedupe Engine (VDE).

The VDE processes each data packet in dedicated hardware, using register transfer level (RTL) instructions, instead of the higher level processor instructions of a shared CPU. This enables the DMS to produce data deduplication rates of up to 90%, and helps it control the latency through the system. Typically running ~50 microseconds, this low and predictable port-to-port latency enables the system to be deployed in latency-sensitive environments, such as IP-based synchronous replication. Another strong use case is live VM migrations, as VMware VMotion requirements state a 5ms maximum latency between vSphere servers.

As a comparison, in order to accommodate the data levels that typically occur in these Hyper-scale WANs, existing solutions must split an aggregated, high speed data connection into multiple slower connections and feed each through a separate WAN optimization controller. Using the Data Mobility Switch – which is up to 10x faster than existing solutions – results in fewer devices to buy, much less complexity to manage and a lower total cost.

Storage Swiss Take

Our impression of this technology is similar to that stated after our last briefing. Deduplication has evolved from a backup application enhancement to a primary storage reduction device and now, a realtime, bandwidth-optimizing technology. Infineta’s approach is very innovative and similarly unique, at least from our perspective. Considering the growth in applications that are generating this kind of inter-datacenter traffic, the Data Mobility Switch seems to be well positioned to meet an expanding need.

Eric Slack, Senior Analyst