Digital Fountain unveils updated data delivery system

Computerworld - In July, Warner Elektra Atlantic Corp. (WEA) moved its data center from its headquarters in Burbank, Calif., to Olyphant, Pa., and needed a quick way to send Oracle database transaction information logs over the 2,000 miles between the two locations on a regular basis for backup and disaster recovery.
WEA, the manufacturing, packaging and distribution arm of Warner Music Group, needed to be able to move tremendous amounts of transaction data files as part of its backup and disaster recovery process.
"When we migrated our data center, we had two options -- send tape and be down for a week or use Transporter Fountain," said Mike Streb, vice president of infrastructure at WEA. Transporter Fountain is the data delivery system from Digital Fountain Inc. in Fremont, Calif. Version 2.0 of the product was released this week.
Transporter Fountain was designed to move data over wide-area networks (WAN) as much as 30 times faster than conventional data delivery systems, Digital Fountain officials said. The product depends upon patented Meta Content technology in which each data packet being transmitted contains a sample of information about an entire file, meaning not as many packets must arrive before a file is complete. Pricing starts at $34,000.
Streb said he spent "less than $200,000" for a high-performance version of Transporter Fountain and invested $1 million in new servers to run it. But he said he expects to receive a return on his investment in two years, since he will no longer be paying about $500,000 annually for a data recovery service.
Streb said Transporter Fountain provides him with more frequent updates, allowing him to avoid shipping costs for tape. After setting up a DS3 line to reduce round-trip travel time and installing Transporter Fountain, Streb can now ship 2TB of data in 48 hours without any downtime.
"This simply wouldn't have been possible with any any other solution," he said.
Sony Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. both resell Digital Fountain, mainly to large companies that need to move large files over WANs, Digital Fountain officials said.
The users who would benefit most from the system include large organizations that need to move large files across the globe, said Lucinda Borovick, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass.
Borovick said Digital Fountain fits into a very large segment of vendors who provide content networking gear or software, although its approach is unique. IDC said the content delivery market is now about $1.6 billion and is expected to grow to about $5 billion in 2006.

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