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RVBD » Topics » Limitations of Alternative Approaches

This excerpt taken from the RVBD 10-K filed Feb 23, 2009.

Limitations of Alternative Approaches

Historically, organizations have implemented partial solutions in attempting to improve the performance of wide-area distributed computing, including:

Additional Investment in Bandwidth and IT Infrastructure Resources

 

  Ÿ  

Bandwidth — Organizations often attempt to improve application performance by making costly investments in more bandwidth. While additional bandwidth may reduce network congestion, no amount of bandwidth can address performance issues caused by high latency and application and network protocol chattiness; and

 

  Ÿ  

IT infrastructure resources — Deploying additional IT infrastructure resources at remote locations can increase selected application and data services performance. However, this approach is expensive, complex to manage and increases the risks of data inconsistency and compromised security.

Deployment of Point Products

Our competitors have designed products that fail to address all of the root causes of wide-area distributed computing problems for a broad range of applications. Such products, which we refer to as point products, include most WAN optimization products, which typically offer some combination of compression, TCP optimization and quality-of-service functions, and can result in a reduction of network congestion and more efficient utilization of bandwidth. However, such WAN optimization products typically do not address application chattiness as comprehensively as we do and many do not provide for continued access to remote files during WAN failures.

In addition to their limited application, these point products often involve deployment and operational complexities that cause network disruption, inefficiency, and difficulties scaling to large numbers of locations. They may often require server or client re-configuration, or complex pre-installation configuration that demands significant amounts of time from IT personnel.

Over time, point product vendors have attempted to incorporate additional functionality to solve for their limitations. These amalgamations of legacy approaches with additional layers of features often suffer from the same underlying issues as their legacy underpinnings: insufficient performance improvement over a broad spectrum of data networking traffic, scaling difficulties, and deployment and operational complexity.

This excerpt taken from the RVBD 10-K filed Feb 15, 2008.

Limitations of Alternative Approaches

Historically, organizations have implemented partial solutions in attempting to improve the performance of wide-area distributed computing, including:

Additional Investment in Bandwidth and IT Infrastructure Resources

 

  Ÿ  

Bandwidth — Organizations often attempt to improve application performance by making costly investments in more bandwidth. While additional bandwidth may reduce network congestion, no amount of bandwidth can address performance issues caused by high latency and application and network protocol chattiness; and

 

  Ÿ  

IT infrastructure resources — Deploying additional IT infrastructure resources at remote locations can increase selected application and data services performance. However, this approach is expensive, complex to manage and increases the risks of data inconsistency and compromised security.

Deployment of Point Products

Our competitors have designed products that fail to address all of the root causes of wide-area distributed computing problems for a broad range of applications. Such products, which we refer to as point products, include:

 

  Ÿ  

Caching — Cache-based architectures are application specific, and accordingly only improve the performance of applications for which they are written. For example, wide area file services (WAFS) approaches only address poor performance of file-based applications. Caches store frequently accessed data objects (files, web pages or attachments) locally at remote locations and replicate and synchronize that data with servers, but this approach has limitations. For instance, when an end-user changes and renames a data object, caches no longer recognize that this data object has moved across the network and cannot optimize its transfer. In addition, caching approaches have inflexible architectures with limited ability to extend to other applications and also increase the risk of data inconsistency; and

 

  Ÿ  

WAN optimization — WAN optimization products, which typically offer some combination of compression, TCP optimization and quality-of-service functions, can result in a reduction of network congestion and more efficient utilization of bandwidth. However, other WAN optimization products typically do not address application chattiness as comprehensively as we do and many do not provide for continued access to remote files during WAN failures.

In addition to their limited application, these point products often involve deployment and operational complexities that cause network disruption, and inefficiency, and difficulties scaling to large numbers of locations. They may often require server or client re-configuration, or complex pre-installation configuration that demands significant amounts of time from IT personnel.

 

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Over time, point-product vendors have attempted to incorporate additional functionality to solve for their limitations. These amalgamations of legacy approaches with additional layers of features often suffer from the same underlying issues with their legacy underpinnings; insufficient performance improvement over a broad spectrum of data networking traffic, scaling difficulties, and deployment and operational complexity.

This excerpt taken from the RVBD 10-K filed Feb 9, 2007.

Limitations of Alternative Approaches

Historically, organizations have implemented partial solutions in attempting to improve the performance of wide-area distributed computing, including:

Additional Investment in Bandwidth and IT Infrastructure Resources

 

  Ÿ Bandwidth — Organizations often attempt to improve application performance by making costly investments in more bandwidth. While additional bandwidth may reduce network congestion, no amount of bandwidth can address performance issues caused by high latency and application and network protocol chattiness; and

 

  Ÿ IT infrastructure resources — Deploying additional IT infrastructure resources at remote locations can increase selected application and data services performance. However, this approach is expensive, complex to manage and increases the risks of data inconsistency and compromised security.

Deployment of Point Products

Our competitors have designed products that fail to address all of the root causes of wide-area distributed computing problems for a broad range of applications. Such products, which we refer to as point products, include:

 

  Ÿ Caching — Cache-based architectures are application specific, and accordingly only improve the performance of applications for which they are written. For example, wide area file services (WAFS) approaches only address poor performance of file-based applications. Caches store frequently accessed data objects (files, web pages or attachments) locally at remote locations and replicate and synchronize that data with servers, but this approach has limitations. For instance, when an end-user changes and renames a data object, caches no longer recognize that this data object has moved across the network and cannot optimize its transfer. In addition, caching approaches have inflexible architectures with limited ability to extend to other applications and also increase the risk of data inconsistency; and

 

  Ÿ WAN optimization — WAN optimization products, which typically offer some combination of compression, TCP optimization and quality-of-service functions, can result in a reduction of network congestion and more efficient utilization of bandwidth. However, WAN optimization products typically do not address application chattiness and do not provide for continued access to remote files during WAN failures.

In addition to their limited application, these point products often involve deployment and operational complexities that cause network disruption and inefficiency. They may often require server or client re-configuration, or complex pre-installation configuration that demands significant amounts of time from IT personnel.

 

6

Table of Contents

EXCERPTS ON THIS PAGE:

10-K
Feb 23, 2009
10-K
Feb 15, 2008
10-K
Feb 9, 2007

RELATED TOPICS for RVBD:

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