Thursday, October 27, 2011

Infineta Targets New Data Center Migrations

To address the huge logistical challenge of migrating to a new data center, Infineta Systems, a start-up based in San Jose, California, has introduced a WAN optimization service built around the company's flagship Data Mobility Switch (DMS).


With the large number of aging corporate data centers across the country, Infineta predicts a growing need to migrate existing applications with very large data sets to new and more efficient facilities or into a service provider's cloud infrastructure. Data migration projects typically must be completed quickly and so maximizing WAN resources will be critical.


Infineta's new DMA service accelerates traffic over WAN links at up to 10 Gbps rates, while expanding WAN capacity by 5-10X and guaranteeing network capacity for critical inter-data center traffic flows. The company calculates that its DMA service offering can cut data migration completion times by 80% or more without incurring capital expenditures. For example. an enterprise migrating 500 TB of data from a Northern California data center to a new facility in Virginia over a 1 Gbps WAN can reduce their migration time from 6 months down to a few weeks by utilizing the DMA service. Further savings are realized by retiring the Northern California data center faster, curtailing staff and equipment expenditures, and not having to provision additional WAN bandwidth. http://www.infineta.com

  • In June 2011, Infineta Systems began shipping its Data Mobility Switch (DMS) designed for optimizing and accelerating "Hyper-Scale" WAN links, such as data center to data center high-bandwidth connections.


    Unlike existing WAN optimization platforms, Infineta has developed a customized "Velocity Dedupe Engine" in programmable logic (FPGAs), providing high throughput while incurring extremely low latencies and maintaining very high data reduction efficiency. The company measures a 5-10x bandwidth capacity gains, IP traffic acceleration, and critical application prioritization and assurance over multi-gigabit WAN links. This would mean a 1 Gbps link would perform like a 5 Gbps link, thanks to the data de-dupe and the other acceleration techniques. The DMS can be configured to guarantee minimum data rates for individual classes of service, enabling customers to carve out "protected circuits" for their bandwidth intensive, latency sensitive applications over their existing WAN links. Similarly, an OC12 (622Mbps) circuit can be turned into a 3 Gbps link, and an OC48 (2.54Gbps) circuit into a 10Gbps link.


    Whereas branch WAN optimization tackles the ‘north/south' traffic between data centers and remote offices, Infineta said its platform scales for the "east/west" between clouds in geographically divergent locations. The DMS switch accepts inputs up to 10 Gbps. The box is initially configured for lower speed inputs (2 Gbps), but the full performance can be unlocked via license upgrades.

  • Infineta was co-founded by Raj Kanaya (CEO) and Dr. K.V.S. Ramarao (CTO). Kanaya previously was VP of product strategy and alliances for the Application Networking Group at Citrix Systems. He joined Citrix though its acquisition of NetScaler where he served as VP of product management. Dr. Ramarao previously served as Chief Platform Architect for the Application Oriented Networking BU at Cisco Systems. Before that, he was founder and CTO of both Conformative Systems (acquired by Intel) and Sariga Networks.