Swan Labs bolsters WAN traffic shapers

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: OPTICAL NETWORKING
07/25/05

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Today's focus: Swan Labs bolsters WAN traffic shapers

By Tim Greene

Swan Labs is updating its WAN acceleration devices to help
customers improve application response times.

On the hardware side, the company is phasing out its NetCelera
devices in favor of a new line called WANJet, packed with extra
memory capable of storing large blocks of data locally so they
don't have to be sent in their entirety across the WAN. By not
waiting for data to make the trip, end users get faster file
downloads and response times from applications, the company
says.

This is a step up from traditional compression also used on the
devices that looks for smaller patterns.

Swan devices sit at either end of WAN connections examining
packet flows, compressing traffic, shaping it and optimizing TCP
to improve throughput. Other vendors, including Expand,
NetScaler, Packeteer, Peribit and Riverbed Technology, also
optimize WANs by multiple methods, with each vendor using a
different techniques.

On the software side, Swan is adding the ability to store blocks
of data in RAM as they are sent so that when the same block is
required in later transmissions, it doesn't have to be sent
across the wire. Instead, the sending machine sends a brief cue
that indicates what previously sent block to use. The receiving
WANJet pulls that block from memory and sends it along to the
local machine that requested it.

Swan calls this process Transparent Data Reduction and says it
can reduce WAN traffic 95% or more, depending on what is being
sent. To accommodate this, the company has increased the memory
in WANJets, for example, from 2G bytes in its old NetCelera 400
to 4G bytes in the new WANJet SL 400.

The software also uses SSL to encrypt traffic sent across the
WAN. While compressed data is difficult to intercept and then
decompress, it is not considered encrypted, the company says.
"It would not be impossible to reverse engineer what we've done
[with compression] and capture data," says Tom Tansy, Swan's
vice president of marketing.

The SSL encryption is important to CitiStreet, an employee
benefits provider in Quincy, Mass., which replicates data
nightly over T-3 circuits to a data center in Florida, says
Barry Strasnick, the company's CIO. "Because we are sensitive
about the security of our clients' data, and even though these
are dedicated lines, we insist on full encryption of
transmissions such as these."

Line improvement

The Swan boxes enable more efficient use of the T-3s for faster
replication times and full encryption of the data, he says. "The
Swan software/hardware provides us the capability to offload
both the encryption and compression from our large HP-UX
computers," he says. "We have had better transmission throughput
and reduced host CPU cycles, and we were able to do it while
still enabling full encryption."

Also new is real-time reporting capability that gives customers
a view of how well applications are performing and to adjust the
devices based on actual network conditions.

Swan also is adding an API to encourage application developers
to write protocol-proxy software that will optimize specific
applications for transmission across IP networks. While Tansy
says the company is negotiating with application vendors for use
of the API, he would not say which ones.

This is part of Swan's Session Matrix Architecture, which tunes
WANJets' treatment of individual applications so they aren't
crippled by unacceptably high packet loss and delay, Tansy says.

WANJets come in two models, SL 200 and SL 400, and scale from
support for 64K bit/sec connections up to 622M bit/sec. They
range in price from $1,500 to $98,000. SL 400 includes bays for
RAID devices, and SL 200 has a slot for a hard disk to store
more data locally.

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To contact: Tim Greene

Tim Greene is a senior editor at Network World, covering virtual
private networking gear, remote access, core switching and local
phone companies. You can reach him at <mailto:tgreene@nww.com>.
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