Expand WAN Optimisation & Application Acceleration
Introducing Expand
Operating since 1998 Expand Networks has pioneered the Wide Area Network (WAN) Optimisation market. Within a crowded market place Expand stands out by delivering commitment to its vision through focusing 100% on WAN Optimisation Controller (WOC) technology, serving to give it the industry's largest single customer installation base, with over 3,500 customers and 40,000 units deployed globally.
Benefits of Expand
Expand are firmly positioned within the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization, offering "strong market understanding, demonstrated through a broad feature set and the best mix of QOS, reporting and acceleration features." Whilst in the Q4 2009 Forrester WAN Optimization report, it is recognised as having "excellent support for virtualized environments" and again stands in the Leader's group - earning class leading scores for product portfolio, management and usability, as well as architecture.
Putting aside tactical cost savings by reducing network bandwidth requirements Expand focuses on bridging the gap between users and business resources that is created by virtualization and server consolidation initiatives... the so called 'Proximity Gap' . Whether it be server virtualization at the datacenter, server consolidation at the branch office or desktop virtualization for remote users, Expand's feature set puts the user in 'Virtual Proximity' to the application and datacentre services. Therefore, Expand makes viable a wide range of capital and operational expenditure reductions whilst maintaining and enhancing productivity with a Return on Investment of 6 months or less.
Key features and benefits for IT departments:
- Virtualizable SoftWOC product option - entirely complimentary to contemporary datacentre consolidation strategies (SoftWOC variant supported on VMWare, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft HyperV etc...).
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure support - giving Citrix and RDP another level of acceleration.
- Native TCP acceleration and dynamic congestion control - compensating high latency/low bandwidth conditions endemic when services are shared across continents (or in Satellite communications).
- Universal Low latency, lossless compression technology - giving average bandwidth increases of between 100% and 400% across all apps.
- Byte-Level caching - delivering Near-LAN like performance for branch office users.
- WAN-Out capability - provides remote branch users with uninterrupted access to the files they were working on during WAN failure.
- Flexible licensing - presenting entry level options/costs to cover immediate needs with potential further return.
- Optimisation for Interactive Applications, such as VoIP, as well as Common Internet File System (CIFS), HTTP, FTP etc.
- Centralised and granular application control and reporting - an alternative to administrative burdensome and lacking telco inbuilt mechanisms / performance tools.
- Layer 3 and Layer 4 header preservation in transparency mode - gives continuity to pre-existing WAN QoS and security features.
- Fully featured Point-to-Point VPN, DNS, DHCP and Print services for small branch office internet based deployments.
Foehn - The Experts in Expand
Along with an in-depth understanding of Expand's technology Foehn combines its extensive understanding of the complexities of IP optimisation (gained through a decade's worth of deployments in the most challenging network environments) with its datacentre virtualization excellence to deliver systems with a solid return.
Furthermore, Foehn can also provide a layered approach to WAN optimisation, by helping remediate and improve the WAN fabric and it's commercial contracts parallel to WOC technology. Refer to our Network Tuning & Benchmark Services for further information.
