The move reflects a wider convergence of WAFS and WAN acceleration technologies, which has already seen Tacit strike a joint marketing and interoperability deal last September with WAN acceleration specialist Packeteer Inc, and Tacit’s rival DiskSites Inc sign a deal with Expand Networks Inc.
Even though it now has its own WAN optimization software integrated with its iShared 3.0 software, Tacit said its partnership with Packeteer will continue.
Like other WAFS product, Tacit’s software allows large businesses to consolidate data from branch offices to data centers, eliminating backup and other data management overheads at those branch offices.
Without WAFS systems, such consolidation would not be practical, because end-user access from branch offices to data held in data centers that are hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away would be unacceptably slow. WAFS systems use file caches to overcome that problem.
But without WAN optimization technology, Tacit’s system like other cache-based products could only be applied to file-level data. With its WAN optimization or TCP acceleration update, the Tacit product can now be used to handle data from applications such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint.
All of these guys have realized that their customers have issues with more than just files, said Arun Taneja, analyst at the Taneja Foundation.
Taneja added that Tacit is likely to continue to need Packeteer’s technology to meet at least some customers’ needs. These [WAFS] companies still need partners to meet all the aspects of what is a fairly wide set of problems, he said.
Tacit claimed that its ARC Acceleration, Reduction, and Compression software is the first WAN optimization code to be based on Windows. Similarly to other WAN optimization products it reduces latency and bandwidth consumption by reducing the chattiness of TCP by replacing remote with local acknowledgements, and other techniques. Data is reduced using data dictonaries and data aggregation techniques.
According to Tacit, it is now the only supplier to have combined WAFS and WAN optimization into one system. One company that disputes that claim is Riverbed Technologies Inc, which describes itself as a WADS WA data services company, and says it has been supplying combined WAFS and WAN optimization software.
Tacit is two years behind us. Tell them welcome to the party, said Riverbed. According to Tacit, Riverbed is not however a WAFS supplier, as its software does not cache files but instead uses data dictionaries to accelerate all data in any format.
At a microscopic level that’s true. You could argue that Riverbed is not a true WAFS supplier. But the real question is does it provide a solution? Riverbed has been doing so well because it has a very rounded set of solutions, Taneja said.
