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It was the costliest software bungle ever in history. The mammoth airliner, A380 was being assembled in multiple locations across Europe. Two of its plants, in Hamburg, Germany and Toulouse, France, were using different versions of the customized software made by Dassault Systemes, thereby resulting in mismatched components being manufactured. The complete project was delayed by a year, the CEO had to resign, close to $6 bn lost in market capitalization, and a client cancelled a $3 bn order due to the delay. All this because two internal systems did not match with each other.

Last year, Citigroup, the world's largest bank, lost account and payment history data on 3.9 mn customers in transit due to a error on part of the courier agency. The data was carried on tapes that were misplaced by UPS. Subsequently, Citigroup promised to eliminate tape backup in remote offices and make the process real-time.

In the globalized world that we live in, even an insignificant error can result in significant losses. Hence, companies have to be on their guard all the time against any discrepancy that might creep into the systems. Nowadays, with multinationals having operations in multiple locations it has become a tough task to inter-connect in a manner that leads to seamless flow of information, thereby reducing a chance for discrepancies to crop up.

Most of the companies today are grappling with the bandwidth issue, as more often than not the data transfer rates that are promised are seldom delivered. There are numerous issues that crop up when a company has a WAN set-up, there could be hardware issue, software issues, latency, etc. Little wonder that WAN optimization and acceleration is turning out to be a big business. According to a survey conducted by Sage Research, "About half report that they are seeking technologies to accelerate file sharing or other applications on the WAN. Additionally, half are pursuing technologies to improve how geographically dispersed employees collaborate."

California based Riverbed Technologies, promises to change all that with a magic wand, more precisely with its Steelhead devices. The company is renowned for its innovative solution that accelerates data transfer over a WAN. Vivek Singh, country manager, Riverbed India, underlines the problems faced by both MNCs and domestic companies in India.

"According to a survey over 67% of employees work in a location other than the headquarter. In this globalized scenario, bandwidth connectivity can be extremely critical. Yet, what is promised is not necessarily the bandwidth speed that one gets and the main reasons behind this is latency and software chattiness," says Singh. "Latency or round trip time (RTT) is the time it takes for a packet to cross a network connection, from sender to receiver and back again. Since every packet sent on the network needs a confirmation, it results in hundreds of round trips for every amount of data sent," he adds.

The Riverbed Steelhead device is part TCP optimization, part proxy, and provides an effective way of reducing the time spent transferring files from one office to another. The company dubs the technology as WDS or Wide-Area Data Services. Founded in 2002, Riverbed has emerged as a leader in WDS solutions for companies worldwide

Usually an organization beset by connectivity issues, goes in for a few clichéd solutions. Increasing the bandwidth, and trying to consolidate the infrastructure. Either of these help but they also end up creating more hassles than the one they resolve.

According to Singh, this is where Riverbed's patented technology comes into play, as it eliminates redundant bytes from transfers thereby resulting in reduction of data that is transferred over the network. The device also eliminates transport protocol inefficiencies and optimizes application WAN performance. For instance, when data passes through a Steelhead it analyses the streams and always locates some segments of a requested file in its cache, thereby eliminating round trips for entire files that have been only slightly changed or renamed.

So, if two employees in different locations were sharing a Word document and it changed slightly, the Steelhead device will not re-send the entire document, albeit it will recover it from its cache memory and only send the part that has changed. "This typically results in up to 100x faster applications and 60% to 95% bandwidth utilization reduction," says Singh.

Depending on the model, a Steelhead appliance can have a WAN capacity from 1 Mbps to 4 Gbps (in a clustered formation). Also the data storage capacity starts from 35 GB and goes up to 1.4 TB. The higher ranged Steelheads, for instance, 5520 and 6020 comes with additional features like triple power supplies, hot swappable disks, etc. " The Steelhead 100 series is targeted at the SMBs and SOHOs; while our 6000-series appliances is designed to meet the needs of offices with many thousands of users, typically a MNC," says Singh.

WDS can play an important role in India, as quite many organizations are grappling with insufficient bandwidth. According to Singh, the ROI is compelling as, "within 3-6 months of installations, the company can leverage its costs. It reduces the number of servers and computers that are originally used to monitor data transmissions in any organizations. Thereby resulting in reduction of overall costs of operations."

He cites the instance of how LG reduced its bandwidth utilization by over 40%, thereby resulting in a cost saving of $500,000 per month in terms of bandwidth expenses!

A seamless network also results in lesser discrepancies cropping up. Thus a bungle like the one that occurred at Airbus Industries could have been avoided if the network infrastructure was well laid out. By accelerating data, Riverbed helps in network optimization.

Shashwat Chaturvedi
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

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