Packeteer Delivers New WAN Acceleration Solution for High Capacity Storage Back Up and Disaster Recovery

Business Wire, Feb 20, 2007

SkyX Accelerator 750 Boosts Data Center Back Up Performance by up to 200X on High Capacity OC12 / STM4 WAN links

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Packeteer([R]) (NASDAQ:PKTR), the global leader in WAN Application Optimization, today announced a strategic software upgrade for its SkyX Accelerator 750 that allows customers to fully utilize the available bandwidth of high capacity OC12 / STM4 WAN links, significantly accelerating storage back up and disaster recovery processes at speeds up to 622 Mbps. High bandwidth OC12 WAN links that provide up to 622 Mbps throughput are utilized by thousands of enterprises worldwide as a critical means of disaster recovery. As much as 97 percent of OC12 bandwidth routinely goes unused, however, during disaster recovery and back up data transfers due to the severe performance impact caused by latency. By overcoming performance-threatening latency and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) constraints to reclaim wasted bandwidth, the SkyX Accelerator 750 can increase data transfer speeds over large WAN links by up to 200 times depending on WAN latency levels. (Note to Editors: See also today's press release "Packeteer Integrates SkyX and Mobiliti Technologies For Advanced Mobile Application Acceleration and Backup.")

"In today's enterprise, the need for accelerated application and storage back up over WAN links has become as critical as the high speed delivery of these applications to the remote workforce," said Lucinda Borovick, program director, datacenter networks, IDC. "It's becoming more common to have to transfer terabytes of data to remote back up sites and this can often take hours to complete. This is unacceptable for disaster recovery where every second counts. Packeteer is delivering a WAN acceleration solution that enables storage and networking professionals to meet the real time performance requirements of today's disaster recovery initiatives."

Wasted Bandwidth: The Disaster Recovery Dilemma

With disaster recovery processes at or near the top of IT priorities, most enterprises now maintain redundant data centers to improve the continuity and survivability of their business in the case of critical IT failures or external disasters. The very large, high capacity WAN links that are used to transfer bulk data are, however, often painfully underutilized due to latency and TCP protocol constraints that severely impact throughput and data transfer speeds. The vast majority of this bandwidth is simply wasted because TCP "chattiness" forces applications to wait for acknowledgements to confirm that data traversing latency-sensitive WAN connections has been sent. For example, TCP limitations on a 622 Mbps OC12 WAN link with 25 ms latency could cripple the transmission rate of a critical application backup to 20.5 Mbps, leaving 97 percent of the network link unused while severely dragging down data transfer times.

SkyX Accelerator 750 Boosts Data Center Back Up

By employing unique protocol acceleration techniques that address WAN latency, Packeteer's SkyX Accelerator 750 enables data transfers that fully utilize the available bandwidth on high performance OC12 WAN links to accelerate data at rates up to 622 Mbps. For a typical regional OC12 WAN link with 25ms of latency, a 100GB back up process which might normally takes 11 hours can now be reduced to 26 minutes with the SkyX Accelerator 750. This boost in data back up speeds results in a 25X performance advantage over native high performance WAN connections. Likewise, a transcontinental link with 200ms of latency can realize up to a 200X performance boost with the SkyX Accelerator 750 solution.

"With our SkyX Accelerator 750, Packeteer is establishing new industry performance benchmarks for disaster recovery and back up," said Mark Urban, director of product marketing, Packeteer. "From our work with thousands of customers worldwide, we know that disaster recovery is a vital business process. But a major roadblock to optimizing this process has been slow data transfer speeds due to TCP chattiness and WAN latency over high capacity links. The SkyX Accelerator 750 removes these roadblocks so organizations can now reach the accelerated, high capacity data transfer speeds that disaster recovery applications demand."

Price and Availability

The SkyX Accelerator 750 is available now in both 311 Mbps and 622 Mbps configurations. List price for the SkyX Accelerator 750 311 Mbps appliance is $52,000. List price for the SkyX Accelerator 750 622 Mbps appliance is $60,000. Existing SkyX Accelerator 750 customers can upgrade to the high performance points; pricing depends on current licensed capacity.

About Packeteer

Packeteer, Inc. (NASDAQ:PKTR) is the global market leader in high-performance, intelligent WAN Application Delivery. With over 60,000 systems deployed at more than 7,000 customers worldwide, Packeteer solutions increase WAN capacity and accelerate and ensure predictable network application performance for all users anywhere in the distributed enterprise. By automatically classifying over 600 applications and protocols and utilizing the most comprehensive network monitoring, QoS, WAFS and acceleration technologies, Packeteer solutions improve business operational efficiency and provide customers with a rapid return on investment. For more information, contact Packeteer at 1 408 873-4400 or visit the company's web site at http://www.packeteer.com.