The cost of wide area network (WAN) links is a significant challenge for South African businesses because of the high cost of bandwidth, large distances and remoteness from international business centres.
That's the assessment of John Rea, Swiss-based multi-country region director for Peribit Networks, who was speaking at the announcement of the latest version of Peribit's Sequence Reduction System software and two new WAN optimisation appliances.
"SA is a long way from anywhere," says Rea. "Even distances between local branches of organisations are great, some areas lack lower cost infrastructures, and bandwidth is extremely expensive because of local infrastructure monopoly."
Alan Rehbock, GM of the Peribit business unit of SA distributor, Source Consulting, cites an example of a bank having to pay R2.4 million a month for its WAN links. "For some companies, as much as 20% of their IT spend is allocated to WAN bandwidth costs."
Rehbock says when organisations run out of WAN capacity, the only alternative to buying more bandwidth at great cost is to implement some kind of capacity optimisation solution. However, he says capacity optimisation involves a lot more than compression.
There are individual solutions for many of the optimisation challenges, he says, but Peribit is a single solution with integrated application acceleration, bandwidth management and remote deployment across the distributed enterprise in addition to compression.
Rehbock says the solution delivers a measurable return on investment (ROI) within a short time, with some companies reporting demonstrable ROI within five days. He says because of the huge expense involved in running WANs, Peribit guarantees organisations will recoup their investment within a year of installation.
Rea says up to 90% of WAN traffic is repetition, which Peribit's sequence reduction system can translate into increasing the capacity of existing WANs by 10 times without having to upgrade the network or buy extra bandwidth.
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