The privately-held developer headquartered in Santa Clara, California is presently in data compression and bandwidth management, competing primarily with Expand Networks in the former and Packeteer in the latter, though each of these companies had added the other technology over the last year. Now it plans to enter new markets, after it launched its Network Sequence Mirroring (NSM) technology in October last year.
NSM is designed to optimize WAN traffic involving very large files, to which end it caches commonly occurring sequences, not in flash memory as on other Peribit appliances, but on hard disk. The first device, the SM-500, ships with a 500GB HDD, and more versions are scheduled for the range, with both larger and smaller drives, according to Steve Wastie, international marketing director for the company.
In addition to working on large production data files winging their way across the WAN, however, that box also opens the way for Peribit to offer optimization of storage applications going over a WAN, such as centralized backup and recovery for branch offices, where obviously the files being transported will tend to be large. As such, it looks to come into competition with WAFS vendors such as Riverbed Technology, Tacit Networks, DiskSites and, of course, Cisco Systems, which threw its hat into the ring late last year with technology acquired as part of Actona Technologies.
The difference, Wastie argued, is that WAFS vendors all introduce proxy servers at each end of the connection to carry out the functions that enables the optimization, be it purely translation to another file format or a combination of that and compression. We don’t use a proxy, he went on.
That technology will be in the next release of the NSM technology, then later in the year Peribit will enter the HTTPS optimization space, which essentially means it will offer SSL acceleration by off-loading some of the processing. Here it will come up against the likes of F5 Networks, NetScaler, RedLine Networks and FineGround, with the challenge being how to optimize traffic when it is encrypted, which means it cannot be inspected to identify patterns. We’re trying to address as many problems in the WAN as possible, Wastie commented.
