Expand Networks www.expand.com, the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, today announces the latest release of its Virtual Accelerator solution for virtualised data centre environments.
By adding support for VMware's Infrastructure 3 Services, Expand's Virtual Accelerator delivers the most advanced levels of VMware integration of any leading WAN optimisation vendor in the market today, enabling IT to utilise VMware's suite of services to deploy, manage, maintain and assure the Virtual Accelerator within the virtualised infrastructure.
The three key elements of the latest Virtual Accelerator release are:
* VMware High Availability (HA) - ensuring the Virtual Accelerator is protected against the effects of physical server failure without the need for costly 'redundant' solutions. In the event of a failure, the Virtual Accelerator is restarted instantly on a different physical server, without intervention from IT, ensuring business continuity, as well as application and user performance is maintained.
* VMware VMotion - in the event of hardware maintenance, failing or under-performing servers, IT is able to migrate the Virtual Accelerator to another virtual machine with zero downtime. Furthermore, by leveraging the existing shared storage it maintains complete transaction integrity, creating a 'warm cache' handover that eliminates the need to build a new cache history.
* Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) - the Virtual Accelerator can be dynamically managed from within DRS, enabling IT to allocate and balance computing capacity across the virtualised infrastructure.
Competitive solutions still deploy physical appliances running proprietary software, and then run VMware on top. This approach adds further complexity and increased costs as additional 'redundant' appliances are required to safeguard against appliance failure and downtime. With Expand, there are no additional 'redundant' licence costs.
As a truly virtualised offering, the Virtual Accelerator overcomes the need for this 'redundant' approach as it sits in the virtualised infrastructure that is protected by VMware's High Availability service, automatically restarting the Virtual Accelerator on another physical machine in the event of a server failure.
Deployed on VMware ESX, VMware ESXi and VMware Server virtualisation platforms, the Virtual Accelerator fully integrates into the virtual infrastructure. Scalability is achieved by running multiple instances of the Virtual Accelerator on one or multiple physical servers, enabling unlimited bandwidth support. Sitting within the virtualised environment, IT is able to utilise the existing hardware, shared storage, management, back-up policies and configuration tools, as well as ensuring existing service level agreements and support services are maintained, thus simplifying data centre management and reducing TCO.
“The innovation of Expand Networks continues with the enhanced functionality of the Virtual Accelerator. Offering the greatest interoperability with VMware in the market, the Virtual Accelerator truly supports enterprises' moving to a fully virtualised infrastructure,” said Efi Gatmor, CTO Expand Networks. “With tighter integration into the virtual infrastructure at the data centre, the Virtual Accelerator further complements Expand's existing ability to deliver branch office consolidation and virtualisation initiatives, such as server-based computing and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) deployments.”
“Expand is the only vendor that can both live within a virtualised infrastructure and have the ability to accelerate all virtualised traffic and application flows across that infrastructure,” claimed Adam Davidson, corporate VP sales & marketing, Expand Networks. “It's like living in a country without being able to speak the language, or conversely being able to speak the language but not having residency in that country. That is the challenge our competitors are facing. Expand is the only vendor today that is fluent in both virtualised infrastructure and the virtualised applications.”
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