Accelerating Wide Area File Services with Hardware Appliances
The rapid proliferation of branch offices, telecommuting, outsourcing, and an increasingly mobile workforce has led to the growing need for Wide Area Networks that allow remote users to connect to the local network as if they were located inside the building. To achieve this, new technologies are being developed to accelerate WAN traffic while keeping remote connections to the central office secure.The Challenge of WAN Optimization
WAN optimization is critical to providing remote users with fast, secure access to important applications. Companies want employees to have access to information and applications with speed and performance that feels like they’re on a LAN. The challenge is providing LAN-like data transfer speeds over long distances and across the Internet, especially when traffic is competing with bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming video. The solution requires innovative technologies such as object caching, compression and protocol optimization, which means storing copies of commonly transferred data on both endpoints in a WAN, compressing files before and decompressing them after transfer, and prioritizing certain business-critical protocols over less critical ones.To achieve these kinds of optimization goals, WAN optimization solution providers rely on a combination of hardware and software. Software is required to compress and decompress the data, to recognize and cache objects to accelerate WAN traffic, and to implement policies to prioritize which traffic should be delivered immediately and which can stand to wait. But software cannot do all of the work alone. WAN optimization programs are installed on dedicated hardware that stores the files and processes the applications.
Much of this hardware is x86-based network application platforms, as the familiar x86 platform makes the development process faster and provides built-in scalability. Lanner provides a number of network-centric platforms that combine performance hardware with customization services to enable partners to develop WAN optimization solutions and bring them to market quickly and conveniently. Lanner has a wealth of experience in network technologies, partnerships with industry-leading silicon vendors and expertise in working with solutions vendors to develop competitive solutions to complex networking challenges such as WAN optimization.
Lanner Solutions for WAN Optimization
Lanner has recently developed several network appliances that provide superior performance, reliability and cost advantages for application developers working on advanced networking technologies such as WAN optimization.The NS04-5130 Network Storage Platform – An Optimum Combination of Price and Performance for Network Applications
The Lanner NS04-5130 is a four-bay network storage appliance designed to provide excellent performance per watt at a remarkably low price. The NS04-5130 integrates four 3.5” hard drives together with the latest Intel® System-On-Chip processor technology to provide enhanced reliability, data redundancy and high availability for a growing range of storage-intensive network applications.
The NS04-5130 is built on the new Intel® EP80579 Integrated Processor, a power optimized SOC for embedded applications. The single chip solution combines processor, north bridge and south bridge functions on the same chip, effectively eliminating internal bottlenecks and providing a faster and more reliable architecture with just one-third the real estate and power consumption of separate chips.
The Lanner NS04-5130 includes hardware accelerated RAID (levels 0, 1, 10 and 5), and 4 terabytes maximum capacity in four hot-swappable hard drive bays. As a network ready appliance platform, the NS04-5130 comes equipped with three gigabit Ethernet ports for high-speed data transmission. Additionally, the proven NS04 design provides highly reliable thermal management to ensure the stability and reliability of critical data.
By building the hardware around the new Intel SOC, Lanner not only achieves improved performance and lower power consumption, but also is able to offer the NS04-5130 at a remarkably attractive price, enabling systems integrators and network appliance developers to reduce time to market and deliver more competitive end products on flexible x86 architecture.
The RS12-38700 Network Storage Appliance – A 12-bay RAID SAS Network Storage Appliance Utilizing 45nm Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processors
The Lanner RS12-38700 is a 45nm Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor-based enterprise-class storage appliance for storage-intensive network applications such as WAN acceleration, security information and event management, cache server and unified communications.
Built around the Intel® 5000P chipset, the RS12-38700 supports two Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5400 Series, 8 fully buffered DIMMs, and two PCI-Express networking modules. A dedicated onboard Vitesse RAID controller supports 12 hot-swappable SAS/SATA hard drives with RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5 data protection, while a 2.5Gbps Cavium encryption engine offloads layer 4 processing to reduce CPU load and deliver more efficient system performance.
By addressing mechanical and electronic issues in the early stages of the design process, Lanner designs and produces network appliances with superior reliability and scalability. And by integrating high capacity storage in an x86 appliance, Lanner network appliances can achieve unsurpassed levels of data redundancy and availability for mission-critical solutions like WAN acceleration.
