WAN appliance underdog Exinda pushes open standard
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(InfoWorld) - Looking for an edge in the hotly contested market for wide-area network performance tools, Exinda Networks wants to help everyone get along. The Melbourne, Australia, company is set to announce on Monday a proposed standard it calls Unified Performance Management (UPM). The standard calls for integrating tools for WAN (wide-area network) optimization, application acceleration, application visibility and application response-time monitoring in one device, but it also would allow single-purpose products from different vendors to interoperate, said Con Nikolouzakis, Exinda's chief executive officer. Exinda, founded in 2002, is up against a consolidating market. Seeing enterprises struggle with poor application performance over networks, startups several years ago began rolling out appliances to speed things up. Bigger players such as Cisco Systems Inc. are now moving in, aiming to make such tools just one more set of features on a router. Exinda says it has a technology edge over bigger players. Its technology is 18 to 24 months ahead of Cisco's, and the company will keep investing to keep in front, he said. WAN optimization and application acceleration are intended to make better use of limited bandwidth and eliminate bottlenecks that slow down data exchange across a WAN. Exinda combines these with tools that show how applications are operating and how long it takes users to finish tasks. The combination allows Exinda's appliance to apply the right mechanisms when they're needed, Nikolouzakis said. It also gives IT administrators evidence, beyond anecdotal reports, that their solutions are working. Demand for better application response is growing fast as more employees work in branch offices and on the road, said IDC analyst Cindy Borovick. The market is consolidating, but there is still room for smaller vendors like Exinda, she said. UPM is an open standard, now in its first version, that will continue to evolve, Nokolouzakis said. Exinda aims to bring it in to a standards body such as the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) or IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.). Nokolouzakis drew an analogy to open standards for security, such as IPSec (Internet Protocol Security). When vendors first started using IPSec, their implementations didn't work together, and it took an open standard to solve the problem. Likewise, security functions such as firewall, VPN (virtual private network) and virus protection are now being combined in unified systems, he said. Exinda could push adoption of UPM by winning over the engineers on technical committees and by getting a large service provider to adopt its technology, Borovick said. A carrier with appliances from many vendors would be have a reason to push for interoperability. Exinda makes a range of appliances spanning everything from branch offices (starting at about US$1,000) to enterprise headquarters, Nokolouzakis said. In the future, it plans to offer a software client for mobile workers. Also Monday, Exinda will add WAFS (wide area file services) capability to its Exinda 4800 and 6800 appliances. The software is designed to speed up file transfers by eliminating the inefficiencies of the CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocol. The CIFS acceleration feature will be available in January as a standard feature on the devices and as a free download from Exinda.
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Fresh gear beats rivals The fresh Xeon-based servers from Sun mark the companyâs most muscular play to date in the x86 realm. The four-socket 2U X4450, in particular, has Sun pushing the equivalent of a midrange SMP down into the heart of the so-called âcommodityâ market. This move plays well with Sunâs historic strengths in the SMP (symmetric multi-processing) arena and supports Sunâs âR&amp;D will winâ mantra.â¦
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This  is very interesting:  "As large MediaWiki deployments may gain performance using Memcached, at some level cost of RAM to store all objects becomes too high. In order to balance resource usage and take more use of Apache server disks, Tugela, the distributed cached on-disk hash database, has arrived."  So Tugela  is like memcached but backed by a disk-based btree.  Since most memcached installs are usually backed by MySQL we would just be duplicating some of the work that MySQL already does. Of course this is probably being a bit unfair.  There wouldn't be any locking in this situation.  I'd like to see benchmarks though.  I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be able to beat an InnoDB install.   ...
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Three years ago, we attended Sun&#39;s quarterly network computing day. It was the heart of the Bust, and we were treated to pot shots directed at IBM and Microsoft and were told that Sun was the true &quot;open standards&quot; vendor.
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Safend, an international provider of endpoint i
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The open-source operating system makes headway with Windows stalwart Dell and gets set for a high-speed plug this weekend.
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A chipset allowing users to send HD video wirelessly throughout the home faces hurdles due to competing technology standards.
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According to a new report,  "Wide Area Network (WAN) Benchmark Report -- Latency Matters," the cost of WAN products and services is the number one challenge for 55% of organizations, especially in the face of the enormous demand for more bandwidth.
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New industry standard should offer cooler, quieter systems--so why isn't anybody rushing to embrace it?
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The company launches an open-source software effort to further its plans to make Fibre Channel over Ethernet a reality.
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Ziff Davis - At half the price of its high-end system, the new ftServer W Series 2300 system offers users an alternative to clusters.
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Enterprises are opening up to open source alternatives to commercial software, panelists said at the SDForum conference âOpen Source Entering the Mainstream,â held in Santa Clara, Calif., last week.
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Opinion: There are only two Web servers that matter. While two-thirds of domains run Apache, Web server share numbers show that Microsoft&#39;s IIS is also a respectable choice.
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Opteron to gain power preservation tech - and other goodies
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Is Network Appliance the company to beat?
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Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi, Ltd., and NEC Corporation have released their jointly developed messaging software as open source. This software implements the Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) standard, a
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A second consortium puts in a bid for the faster 802.11n spec. But don't expect a battle over formats.