Expand Networks Keeps Rolling with New Products, Customers

Expand Networks, a manufacturer of network compression and acceleration appliances, has started 2004 with a bang. Yesterday the Roseland, New Jersey, company announced its largest bandwidth optimization device yet, a box for large data centers that handles 200 Mbps of raw bandwidth and supports 1,500 WAN nodes. It also has two new customers in the insurance business: one that bought nearly 3,500 acceleration devices for $5 million, and another that reports up to 7:1 compression on MIMIX network replication.

Expand Networks has devised a novel way to squeeze much more IP traffic into a given pipe than it could normally handle. Instead of using standard caching or compression techniques, the company found that IP traffic is composed of many repetitious byte-level patterns and that these patterns can be safely removed from the datastream and temporarily cached at each end of a two-sided connection.

This approach led to the development of an algorithm that Expand has patented and built into a network appliance, which it calls IP ACCELERATOR. Instead of sending an entire IP packet across a network link, the ACCELERATOR replaces the most recent and repetitious byte-level patterns with short identifiers, or tokens, that tell the corresponding ACCELERATOR device on the opposite side of the network which patterns to reinsert into the IP datastream, and where.

Expand reports that its ACCELERATORS can achieve compression as high as 5:1 for certain types of data. OS/400 data, particularly high-availability replication data streams, is receptive to this technique, and is therefore highly compressible.

The first reports of excellent bandwidth optimization with OS/400 replication started to appear last spring. International logistics operator Kuehne & Nagel reported that Expand’s ACCELRATOR provided 5:1 network compression for its DataMirror high availability replication environment. Last summer, Expand announced that O’Reilly Auto, a growing auto parts retailer, had successfully deployed ACCELERATORS to boost the bandwidth available to its Vision Solutions‘ high availability environment.

In December, Expand announced that Value Options, the large healthcare insurance provider from Virginia, has installed ACCELERATORS to free some bandwidth. Value Options uses Lakeview Technology‘s OS/400 high availability software, called MIMIX, to replicate insurance claims between its primary data center in Norfolk to a second data center in Reston, which serves as its disaster-recovery hot site.

Mark Pittman, Value Options vice president of IT, says his company’s use of the MIMIX application was beginning to irritate him because of its voracious appetite for bandwidth and delays that could adversely affect the company’s 23 million customers. “We were tying up three T1 lines and gearing up to go to six or seven [T1 lines],” Pittman says. “Our T1s at the time cost $1,500 a month.”

When companies begin replicating large amounts of data to offsite locations, using MIMIX or any other high availability product, bandwidth becomes a major constraint. Besides throwing more bandwidth at the problem, users of high availability will often streamline their network needs by lessening their use of the high availability product, such as by eliminating certain non-essential data, like development work, from the replication process.

As an alternative to purchasing additional T-1 lines, Pittman asked one of his colleagues to begin exploring how they could lessen their use of MIMIX. Before fiddling with their MIMIX settings, however, one of Value Options’ network service providers, Emergent Online, introduced the company to Expand Networks.

After evaluating the boxes, Value Options purchased two ACCELERATORS and immediately started getting payback. When Pittman saw peaks of 700 percent data acceleration with MIMIX replication, he tossed out any plan of tinkering with the replication process. “With the kind of technology that Expand used, the data sent by MIMIX would have been very friendly toward that kind of compression, and indeed it was,” Pittman says. “Once we put the Expand boxes in, MIMIX started working much better, and it ceased to irritate me.”

Value Options found–as had two other OS/400 shops before it–that 5250 data compresses extremely well on the Expand boxes. Value Options got an average of 5:1 compression on MIMIX data, while e-mail compressed at a 3:1 ratio, Pittman says. “The 5250 data compresses very well,” he says.

The ACCELERATORS ended up saving Value Options about $10,000 per month on T1 upgrades, and Pittman estimates the ACCELERATORS paid for themselves in three months. Since then the company has purchased what had been Expand Networks’ largest ACCELERATOR–the 6800 Series, rated to 45 Mbps (a T3 line)–and plans to deploy additional ACCELERATORS on its 40-site WAN.

Until yesterday, the 6800 Series IP ACCELERATOR, which costs $45,000, was Expand’s largest device. Today, the ACCELERATOR System 9000, which starts at $64,995, holds that honor. The System 9000 provides Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, redundant power supplies ExpandView’s traffic analysis software, and supports up to 1,500 sites at speeds of up to 200 Mbps (roughly the equivalent of four and one-half T3 lines). As such, the System 9000 is best suited for the large data center operations of multinational corporations in the retail, healthcare, and financial services industries, Value Options says.

Expand reported yesterday that a large, unnamed insurance company based in the Midwest has implemented 3,450 Expand ACCELERATORs at offices around the country. The company, which didn’t want its name used, self-installed an average of 30 devices per day for six months, and it expects a return on investment in three to nine months.

This article has been corrected since it was first published. The article originally stated that Value Options had reported that a large, unnamed insurance company based in the Midwest has implemented 3,450 Expand ACCELERATORs at offices around the country. It was, in fact, Expand Networks that issued the report. Guild Companies regrets the error. [Correction made 01/21/04.]