OEM deal with IBM could help Bridgeworks establish its new way of boosting the WAN

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1 OEM deal with IBM could help Bridgeworks establish its new way of boosting the WAN Analyst: John Abbott 31 Mar, 2014 When we last covered Bridgeworks almost a year ago, we said that the company was about to attract more attention than it had in its previous 30-year history. And we were right. Soon afterwards, the company signed an OEM agreement with IBM to incorporate its SANSlide 'pure' WAN optimization technology into Big Blue's Storwize product lines. That partnership is now ramping up, and as it does Bridgeworks itself is in the process of closing multiple deals directly with end-user companies in the healthcare and financial sectors. It's also inking reseller agreements with channel partners and SIs. Bridgeworks doesn't much like the term WAN optimization, because its data- and protocol-agnostic acceleration engine, which sends multiple parallel streams of traffic across standard IP networks and optimizes the traffic flow using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, is very different from the typical mixture of caching, compression and de-duplication usually implied by the term. The 451 Take Bridgeworks calls what it does 'pure WAN optimization' or 'storage protocol acceleration' its point is that commonly used WAN optimization techniques such as compression and de-dupe can often add to overall latency, while at the same time limiting the amount of possible bandwidth to manage (due to the computing requirements needed to perform those tasks). Essentially, the difference is between minimizing the amount of data sent versus restoring the full bandwidth available. SANSlide doesn't touch the data it just moves it through the pipe as quickly as possible by managing the protocol intelligently and by filling the pipe. Aside from the performance and efficiency gains, this approach avoids regulatory and data integrity Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 issues that have affected other WAN optimization approaches. It's a clear differentiator. IBM's endorsement should help increase Bridgeworks' profile, and other OEMs may follow. And the company has wider ambitions that stretch beyond storage toward cloud and mobile applications. Context For the first 30 years of its life, Christchurch, UK-based Bridgeworks (until 2002 known as Digital Interfaces) was content to remain small as it focused on mastering the niche market of data storage connectivity specifically on bridging different protocols, interfaces and topologies. Since last year, however, the company has used that past experience and applied it to a different problem: how to transmit data over long distances, using TCP/IP-based private or public networks. Bridgeworks has 20 employees and is profitable. It has built up 25,000 customers over the years across all product lines, including end users such as online pharmacy CVS Caremark. SANSlide was first introduced in 2009 and customers now number more than 150. The company recently opened its first US office, in Boulder, Colorado. CEO David Trossell, who previously held technical positions at computer makers Rediffusion (now ROCC Computers), Norsk Data, Pyramid Technologies (now part of Fujitsu) and tape storage specialist Spectra Logic, is also the primary inventor of Bridgeworks' intellectual property. Products The momentum behind the SANSlide offering is growing and it's at the core of Bridgeworks' strategy going forward. The company's aim is to mitigate the latency of storage traffic over the WAN to almost zero, which is done by enabling multiple parallel links on top of TCP/IP, which helps fill up the pipe to its maximum capacity. Meanwhile, AI techniques help optimize the data flow across the network. Bridgeworks claims that it can optimize remote data replication and large data transfers to make them 95% more efficient and less expensive. SANSlide is both data-agnostic (leaving the data unaltered) and protocol-agnostic (fiber channel, SAS or SCSI), and it's been designed to be self-managing and easy to use and install. SANSlide comes in the form of 1U or 2U appliances that are installed at either ends of the WAN TCP/IP link. There is a family of products including the SANSlide 100, 150, 400 and 800. The 100 and 150 are point-to-point offerings that are configured for one protocol (FC, SCSI, iscsi, SAS, FTP, etc.), the difference between the two being that the 150 has a dual power supply for extra Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 resilience. They operate to a maximum of 35ms of latency. The SANSlide 400 can support up to 10 connections as well as multiple protocols through four feature card slots in each box they operate to a maximum latency of 90ms and can support multiple-pipe 10Gbe WANs. Protocols can be bridged in flight. Finally, the high-end 800 boxes support up to 256 connections, include seven feature card slots for multi-protocols, and have no latency limit. All of the boxes can be mixed and matched as required, with high-end boxes located at central sites and the smaller ones in fan, hub-and-spoke or nested network configurations. Going forward, instances will also be locatable within VM environments. Strategy IBM initially certified the SANSlide series 150 appliances to work with its SAN Volume Controller and Storwize V7000 virtualized storage arrays, recommending it as a means of achieving efficient IP-based replication over long distances. But Big Blue soon realized that it would be advantageous to embed the technology within its SVC and Storwize products which is relatively easy because of Storwize's software architecture that enables third-party integration. The embedded component, which is less than 20Mb in size and light on CPU consumption, is the AI data acceleration core called Myelin that Bridgeworks had packaged specifically for the OEM market. It gives IBM customers a cheaper alternative compared with fiber channel or fiber channel over Ethernet (FCoE) replication. Bridgeworks also has existing OEM agreements with Dell and Spectra Logic, though it hasn't said if these companies are evaluating SANSlide. The company's channel partners include Agilesys, Avax International (Canada), CorpTech, DISUK, istorage Networks (South Africa) and Zycko. It's seeking additional resellers and service delivery partners from the cloud, managed services and hosting-provider sectors. Vertical markets targeted include financial services, government, healthcare and retail. Competition Even if their technical approaches are different, it's inevitable that Bridgeworks will be compared with the established WAN optimizers most obviously companies such as Riverbed, Cisco and Silver Peak, which essentially provide intelligent content transformation services based on de-dupe, protocol transformation and optimization, and caching to accelerate WAN links, and similarly require appliances at both ends. Another class of vendors provides application delivery controllers, which is more of an application-centric technology for datacenters. These include F5, Citrix's NetScaler and Brocade, all of which provide similar content and protocol optimization from the Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 server side. As both categories begin to be deployed as virtual instances, it's likely that the two will come closer together. The fundamental difference is that WAN optimization is data-focused, the idea being to eliminate redundant data wherever possible. It's best suited for file-based data that is not time dependent and can be compressed, as well as 'warm' data that the application or host system has seen before. SANSlide doesn't change any data, so it can handle encrypted data without problems. It's a better approach for cold and unstructured data that has not been seen before by the application or hosts, such as any batch process or data that changes rapidly. Other related approaches include those from content delivery service providers (e.g., Akamai and CloudFire), technology vendors that group multiple broadband connections into larger capacity links (e.g., Mushroom Networks), router suppliers with optimization technologies (e.g., Cisco with its Peformance Optimized Routing), appliance makers offering link optimization independently of the router (e.g., Barracuda Networks, XRoads Networks, Elfiq Networks and F5), and a growing number of virtual networking firms that utilize a mix of owned and Internet links (e.g., Aryaka, Pertino, Talari Networks). Other activity in this area has focused on converged networking adapter (CNA) and datacenter-bridging (DCB) technologies that aim to 'harden' the Ethernet transport layer to make it more suitable for running upper-layer protocols such as fiber channel. DCB uses techniques such as hardware-based bandwidth allocation and priority-based flow control. CNAs typically support FCoE, but FCoE doesn't operate over distances much longer than 300m. Fiber channel over IP, which overcomes those distance limitations, is conceptually closer to what Bridgeworks is doing with SANSlide, but it doesn't handle packet loss well, which can lead to corruption, especially when used for backups. With its HyperIP storage acceleration product, Veteran NetEx (25 years in business) may be the closest equivalent to SANSlide. The company employs the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for long-distance transport. Other accelerated file transfer companies, mostly using UDP for transport rather than TCP, include Data Expedition, JScape, Tixel and intriguingly Aspera, which IBM acquired in December Aspera uses its own patented protocol called fasp ('fast and secure') as a replacement for TCP/IP-based protocols such as FTP, and is designed to accelerate long-distance bulk data movement of large structured and unstructured data sets. There's clearly some overlap between Aspera and Bridgeworks, which is likely to increase if Bridgeworks introduces its own FTP support at some point in the future. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Bridgeworks uses a storage-focused approach to tackle latency without changing the data or underlying TCP/IP stack while also bridging multiple storage protocols. The company doesn't have a high profile or large resources, and it's based in the UK, so there's work to be done establishing an international presence. Opportunities Threats Bridgeworks has wider ambitions that could see it apply its core technologies beyond pure storage toward cloud and mobile applications. The fact that the first high-profile SANSlide OEM IBM Storwize recently acquired a related company must raise some question marks about the deal. Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 6