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Two-year-old WAN-optimization startup Peribit Networks Inc. this fall will set its sights on shortening application response times and spanning larger networks when it releases new software and hardware aimed at each.
The Santa Clara, Calif., vendor next month will add new Packet Flow Acceleration (PFA) technology to its Sequence Reducer hardware, which employs proprietary Molecular Sequence Reduction technology to compress redundant data flows going across expensive WAN links.
PFA surpasses existing sequence reduction algorithms by addressing latency in TCP both for short transactions and long data flows, such as large file transfers using File Transfer Protocol.
“TCP uses a significant portion of total transfer time in just setting up a sender and receiver contract before you actually start the transmission. It slows the chatty applications that require many small sessions. We do fast connection setup and accelerate the contract-signing process,” said Amit Singh, Peribit CTO.
For long file transfers that require fewer but longer transactions, PFA reduces the wait time for an acknowledgement from the receiver by requesting that more data be sent within a transaction.
“We take the existing acknowledgement that says, for example, I received the first 1000 bytes, and we modify the phrase to say, Give me the next 64KB instead of 16KB,” Singh explained.
Since wait times are fairly lengthy over long distances, the PFA technology promises to bring LAN-like performance to users accessing remote EPR applications between continents, according to Peribit user Chip Greel, senior network architect at Finisar Corp. of Sunnyvale, Calif.
“More than two-thirds of our ERP users are across the big pond. If you can make it appear theyre not across the big pond when operating Oracle or other applications, it makes them a lot more productive,” he said.
But Greel warned that when used with a Quality of Service technology, large data transfers could starve smaller and lower-priority applications for bandwidth. “With PFA, you really have to dial in your QOS,” he added.
Along with the new PFA technology, Peribit Networks in November will release a higher-end SR-80 with greater port density and capacity for central sites. The new SR-80 doubles the total number of ports its existing high-end device supports. Along with support for 320 connections, the new two-rack unit device provides a fiber optic interface as well as copper interface for 10/100/1000 Ethernet and includes dual, hot-swappable power supplies. The new device also supports up to 45 155-Mbps OC-3 links.
The benefits of Peribits Sequence Reduction compression and latency reduction technologies may only apply, however, to private leased line or Frame Relay networks, pointed out John Morency, president of Momenta Research Inc. in Chelmsford, Mass.
“Their encoding scheme is dependent upon there being a set of clear text, from the IP header on down. If Im using SSL or any other type of encryption mechanism, the whole SR/PFA technology wont do a lot for me because with encryption you dont get to have regularly recurring patterns,” he explained.
Finisar is using the Peribit boxes in a private ATM network, Greel said.
The PFA software is due next month and is a free upgrade for current customers with maintenance contracts. The new SR-80 is due in November and starts at $22,500.