Infineta Launches Pay-As-You-Go WAN Optimization Service

There are three objectives behind the launch of Infineta Systems' pay-as-you-go WAN optimization service built around the company's Data Mobility Switch (DMS) product, says Haseeb Budhani, VP, products. Originally intended to address customers that were facing data migration projects but didn't want WAN optimization, the new service also appeals to service providers that don't want to spend anything on capex and want to do it all in opex. The third objective is to allow prospective customers to try the service before deciding if they want to buy a DMS product.

"Once they've tried it, they like it," says Budhani. The company in June officially unveiled its DMS offering, which provides an 80%-plus WAN footprint reduction via hardware dedupe and a five to eight times price/performance advantage over all comers. The company is currently doubling its sales staff to try and keep up with demand.

According to an in-depth lab report from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), Infineta's hyper-scale WAN optimization product not only reduces the time-to-completion for finite workflows, but also significantly reduced the amount of traffic traversing inter-data-center WANs. It reported that DMS' most unique feature is the Velocity Dedupe Engine, a hardware-based deduplication engine that enables the DMS to maintain the highest levels of data reduction at multigigabit speeds while guaranteeing port-to-port latencies in the tens of microseconds: "ESG Lab has confirmed that Infineta’s Data Mobility Switch is more than capable of satisfying the most demanding data-center-to-data-center replication and server mobility needs for businesses of all sizes."

Infineta says its pay-as-you-go data migration service enables companies to improve business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) by bringing new data centers online faster and by quickly decommissioning old data centers; increase business agility by enabling rapid data center applications deployment; avoid large capex; reduce opex on project staff and equipment by four to five times; and curtail expenditures on additional WAN capacity by leveraging existing WAN infrastructure.

While nothing has been finalized, Budhani says, the company is actively working on lining up partners, with EMC topping the list. "We're working very closely with them on a number of things, but there is nothing to announce yet." He says there are both service and product opportunities with the storage giant, and that something could be in place as early as the first quarter of 2012.

ESG senior analyst Bob Laliberte says Infineta is a product company, and by offering the service it has another go-to-market way to leverage its technology in a meaningful way. "Data migration is a huge pain point, a dirty little secret not well advertised but starting to come into vogue." He believes it is a great foot in the door to enable potential customers to see the benefits in a real-world scenario.

It's a significant market, he adds. "Data migration is a real part of everybody's life and pretty much constant." Another trend that should fuel further growth is the massive data center consolidations that have become the norm of the last few years.

Given Infineta's size, Laliberte says, a partnership with a company like EMC or HP can play a huge role in validating the company's value and alleviate any fears it is too small. "The best way to establish that trust ... is to be associated with a partner, ... so it will be important to establish those relationships to establish that credibility in that space."

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