Expand and Riverbed® Virtualise Acceleration
Virtual WAN from Expand Networks is a WAN optimisation solution running on VMware's ESX hypervisor and an off-the-shelf Intel x86 server. This allows WAN traffic acceleration and WAFS server consolidation in a virtual environment. For Christian Honoré, France, Benelux and Southern Europe Director, “the price of an Expand platform is divided by three, with support for data transfer (via VMotion) and high availability included”. With Virtual WAN the enterprise can centralise applications and security, with a rack of blade servers processing and accelerating RDP or ICA exchanges with remote terminals – and the Expand code only uses 4% of the server's CPU. Expand has ambitious growth targets for the product: “50% of our clients will be virtualised by 2011, and 100% by 2015”. Or to put it another way, this could be the end of the road for appliances at remote sites.
Or maybe not. Riverbed thinks differently; virtualisation is focused on the appliance itself. The RSP services platform, developed in partnership with VMware, places the hypervisor at the core of the Riverbed appliance. The remote site appliance includes services such as DHCP and printer sharing. But, says Christian Lorenz, Riverbed's Direct of Product Marketing for Europe, “everything can be managed from a central site”. He adds “RSP virtualisation delivers faster copying of virtual images over TCP/IP. More services can be managed from the datacenter and images can be replicated between different sites”. Riverbed has its eyes on the Cloud Computing model, with data and services consolidated and replicated. A vision – code named Atlas – scheduled to roll out in 2009. | |
Geocluster®: Data synchronisation in the cluster, the killer application for Microsoft
With Windows Server® 2008, Microsoft® introduced some exciting new clustering features, which we covered in ITRecovery News no. 1. Microsoft's multi-site clustering supports WAN deployments with physical or virtual clustered nodes spread across geographically remote sites. Windows Server 2008 adds support for clustered nodes on separate networks, something that was previously impossible. But Microsoft depends on partners to deliver solutions to fully support inter-site cluster management, and in particular cluster-to-cluster data synchronisation. With this month's launch of GeoCluster, Double-Take® Software may have introduced the killer application for Microsoft. The only solution of its kind currently available, GeoCluster is an effective alternative to costly SAN to SAN replication or the somewhat limited log shipping feature of Exchange and SQL Server (automation of database backups and restoration on a different server). GeoCluster supports asynchronous replication of geographically distributed clusters. A key new product, strengthening the Double-Take – Microsoft partnership.
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