McData does WAN acceleration

Computerworld - McData Corp. today announced that is reselling a type of WAN acceleration technology from Riverbed Technology Inc. to be used with its director-class switches, allowing remote office access of applications and files from a central site at LAN-like speeds.

McData is rebranding Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance, calling it the McData SpectraNet WDS. The device uses file caching and TCP optimization to speed data transfer over shared networks and is part of an effort by McData to offer remote office consolidation services, including SAN extension technology and professional consulting.

“This is way more than a technology announcement; It’s a solution for branch office consolidation. And it is coming from McData, a partner that enterprise class data center managers know and trust,” said Brian Garrett, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass.

Garrett noted that McData’s service and support offering, combined with the Steelhead appliance, is particularly important for technology deployments in large companies with remote offices. He also said that McData’s installed base of enterprise accounts will be a boon for Riverbed, a private San Francisco-based company founded in 2002.

Riverbed’s appliance improves the performance of applications, in part, by removing “chattiness” from networks by reducing the number of unnecessary electronic handshakes that take place when data is transferred between servers on a shared network.

Eric Nichols, CIO at Solutia Inc. in St. Louis, a $2.7 billion company that makes stain resistance chemicals for carpets, has been running Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances since September 2004. He said it has greatly reduced the number of T1 lines his company deploys and cut the IT department’s workload.

“It used to be that multiple sites would access these files, and it got to the point where even though you had plenty of bandwidth, the files were not able to open across the WAN because of ancient file share technology,” Nichols said. “Now we have people saying the first time they open these files it is faster, but the second time it opened up lightening fast.”

Nichols said he originally bought the Steelhead appliances to reduce some of his company’s 17 e-mail servers in remote offices. He has since also used them to consolidate his Exchange server environment.

Solutia has 15 major manufacturing plants and administrative sites and 45 smaller remote sales offices. By using 10 Steelhead appliances in the manufacturing and administrative sites, Nichols was able to consolidate e-mail and exchange shares to the company’s Michigan office.

“We plugged the devices in and saw network traffic drop by 50%. We have people who can create very large Excel files, and now they can store on them on the file share in St. Louis,” Nichols said.

Solutia is purchasing two more Steelhead appliances this year and hopes the company will come out with even smaller, less expensive devices for his remote sales offices that would optimize remote office VPN traffic.

A McData spokesman said his company looked at wide-area file services (WAFS) technology from companies such as Tacit Networks Inc. in South Plainfield, N.J., and WAN optimization technology from companies such as Peribit Networks Inc. but found those technologies lacking.

“WAN optimization only solves the TCP problem. Tacit solves the file problem but not the Exchange or backup problem,” the spokesman said. “Riverbed was the only company that attacked the problem from three angles: caching, network bandwidth and application access.”