Peribit Introduces Application Acceleration technology that enables e-mail, Web and file server consolidation

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, April 4, 2005

Peribit Networks, a leader in application delivery over the WAN, has announced availability of its breakthrough Application Flow Acceleration (AppFlow) technology, which transparently speeds performance of Microsoft Exchange, file services, and web-based applications over wide area networks (WANs). The AppFlow technology is a strategic enhancement to Peribit Networks' integrated PeriSphere architecture, which enables IT to consolidate and centralize servers while delivering LAN-like application performance to branch-office users.

Peribit Networks today also announced the SM-250 and SM-500 Cluster, two new additions to the Sequence Mirror (SM) product family, and version 5.1 of the Sequence Reduction System (SRS) software. SRS software is the operating system at the heart of all Sequence Mirror and Sequence Reducer (SR) products and enables IT to provide LAN-quality application delivery across the WAN.

Many distributed enterprises today are consolidating their mission-critical servers to reduce costs, simplify maintenance and management, and more easily comply with state and federal regulations.

According to Joe Skorupa, Principal Analyst at Gartner, "Accelerating Exchange, CIFS, and web application performance as part of a broad-based architecture for application acceleration removes a major obstacle to server centralization projects."

The Peribit AppFlow technology is an acceleration component of the PeriSphere architecture, which integrates compression and caching, acceleration, application control, and visibility technologies to improve the performance of applications over the WAN. AppFlow technology enables businesses to centralize their Exchange, Microsoft file and web application servers without sacrificing the performance that branch-office users have come to expect.

"It's all about centralization," says Martin Cox, Technical Services Manager, Planning and Development at BOC Edwards, which is in the midst of phasing out aging Exchange servers in remote offices and centralizing services at its Wilmington, Mass. headquarters. "The Peribit solutions, which have already had a dramatic impact on e-mail performance over the WAN, will allow us to continue our consolidation effort and realize our corporate objective of centralizing services to reduce costs and simplify administration."

The AppFlow technology provides the acceleration needed for applications that cannot benefit from TCP acceleration until their own protocol limitations are removed. Microsoft Exchange and Common Internet File System (CIFS) file services applications were initially designed for local area network (LAN) environments, so their performance drops dramatically when used across a WAN link that has even modest latency. Similarly, web pages for in-house and packaged applications build very slowly across the WAN because they depend on sequential delivery of tens to hundreds of objects.

The AppFlow technology accelerates the performance of applications based on three specific protocols: the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) used by Exchange; Microsoft CIFS; and HTTP. The implementation of all three AppFlow techniques is fully transparent to clients and does not interfere with normal client-to-server communications resulting in fail-safe operation.

The AppFlow technology greatly improves response times for remote Outlook/Exchange users by requesting portions of the message in advance of the client's request, pipelining what had been a serial and inefficient bulk transfer. As a result, the entire e-mail and any attachments are local to the client by the time the client requests the message. Peribit Networks' ability to accelerate Exchange benefits even fairly low-latency links of 30 ms or more.

Web pages typically include dozens of separate objects, each of which are requested serially and one at a time. Consequently, building a web page takes at least as many round trips as there are objects on the page. To speed web-based application performance across the WAN, Peribit devices learn the objects associated with a URL and pipeline them across the link so that they are available locally when the page is requested a second time.

The SM-250 extends the benefits of Peribit Networks' award-winning Network Sequence Mirroring (NSM) sequence caching technology to branch offices. The NSM technology records patterns across packets, sessions, and flows and stores them on hard disk so that, if repeated later, they can be identified and removed from data streams even when they are separated by hundreds of gigabytes of data sent days or weeks apart, and even when the transmitted files have been modified. The other member of the SM product family, the SM-500, received the Editor's Choice Award from Network Computing in November 2004.