Sending data over IP WANs just got 3X faster |
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By Jo Maitland, News Director
16 Jul 2004 | SearchStorage.com |
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NetEx, formed in 1999 as a spin-off of StorageTek Corp, has announced HyperIP R5, the fifth version of its software for accelerating data transfers over wide area IP networks. The company says its product is finally starting to resonate with users.
HyperIP R5 reduces TCP/IP degradation issues and packet loss at distances greater than 200 miles. NetEx spokespeople said that this results in an application throughput boost ranging from 300 to 1,000 percent compared to standard IP networks. Turning on HyperIP compression increases that throughput an additional 2 to 15 times, depending on the data's compressibility, it claims.
So far NetEx has announced just one customer, Telstra Corp Ltd, the Australian telephone company, but it is also working with Verizon Communications and Bell South Corp., as well as a large bank in Germany and two oil companies.
"Anything that provides three times greater improvement in throughput will make everyone's ears prick up … my nervousness about it is that it's proprietary," said Mike Carp, analyst with Enterprise Management Associates.
HyperIP uses a proprietary transport protocol that runs over UDP (User Datagram Protocol), which compensates for the latencies involved in typical TCP/IP transmissions. Unlike Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) or Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) technologies, HyperIP works with any IP-based application, although it does require a user to deploy HyperIP appliances on both ends of a connection.
Carp notes that the technology has been around for a while which should give users some comfort. StorageTek was working on the product in-house for several years before it was spun-out into NetEx. "It has a substantial history … industries that might get good value out of the product would be supercomputing, petrochemical analysis, that kind of environment, it's not really for general purpose use," he said.
HyperIP R5 has added proxy server support and is now certified with EMC SRDF Adaptive Copy and SRDF/A on Gigabit Ethernet Directors, Network Appliance Inc. SnapMirror, Veritas Corp. Volume Replicator and NetBackup, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, Microsoft Corp. Exchange NetBIOS, Oracle Corp. DB Rsync, NSI Software Inc. DoubleTake, McData Corp. iFCP, industry-standard iSCSI, and industry-standard FTP.
Unlike the majority of approaches to high-speed data transport that have additional hardware requirements, HyperIP uses a bog-standard Intel server that attaches to an existing network infrastructure and requires no changes to servers, storage controllers, applications or network devices, the company said. Alternative hardware approaches include Tacit Networks and Actona (recently acquired by Cisco). Other companies offering this solution in software include Perebit Networks and Expand Networks.
HyperIP R5 is available now starting at $19,750.
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