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Coriolis Bursts Into SANs: Page 2 of 3

Optiflow sets up and tears down connections on demand, only tying up bandwidth when there’s traffic to carry. It can do this in a more granular way than other multiservice provisioning platforms, according to Wortman. It assigns bandwidth to circuits in half-megabit increments. Other vendors in this space, like Appian Communications and Geyser Networks Inc., carve up capacity in 1.5-Mbit/s chunks.

OptiFlow also prioritizes different types of traffic, and makes use of otherwise empty protection circuits in Sonet rings to further increase bandwidth efficiency.

Crossroads' 7100 is an ideal accompaniment to Coriolis’s platform, according to Wortman, mainly because it’s small and simple. It’s the size of a pizza box and has only two ports -- one Fibre Channel for connecting the SAN, and one Sonet for connecting Optiflow.

Wortman says other partnerships often aim on linking optical gear with much more complicated and expensive SAN switches. “That's like shooting a rabbit with an elephant gun," he contends.

Coriolis is demonstrating its Optiflow platform at the Comnet show in Washington this week, at booth number 4302 (see Coriolis to Demo OptiFlow Network).