DiskSites Partners To Extend Reach

Earlier this year I wrote about DiskSites, a vendor specialising in the optimisation of the infrastructure used to link branch offices and remote locations to centralised IT resources. Disksites goal is to assist organisations that are seeking to consolidate IT services to central locations in order to simplify the management of said IT infrastructure, achieve cost of ownership savings, provide improved reliability whilst minimising risk. Last week the company announced a string of relationships designed to make its solutions available to a much wider population than had previously been achieved.

DiskSites solutions aim to provide ‘LAN-like’ connectivity to users linked to corporate IT systems via Wide Area Networks. In real terms, the cost of network bandwidth is today much lower than ever before and high bandwidth, even extremely high bandwidth, connectivity is available to almost all organisations in the developed world. However, for many systems, the lack of bandwidth alone may not be the most important factor in the quality of service delivered to customers linked over WAN networks.

The solutions supplied by DiskSites aim to provide LAN type connections over WAN links through a combination of caching, data compression, protocol acceleration and WAN management capabilities. The company’s VBranch products, namely the BranchPort appliance and BranchController appliance, are currently deployed by over one thousand customers, mostly located in North America. A spate of recent announcements by DiskSites has launched several partner relationships designed to take its offerings to Europe and the Asia Pacific regions.

One such announcement highlights a three year agreement by which DiskSites will provide its innovative wide area file services (WAFS) VBranch products to Unisys. Unisys in turn will use the DiskSites technology to integrate a complete product and services solution to be sold to Global 2000 customers through Dell and other Unisys global channel partners.

At the same time DiskSites also released details of a relationship with OKI Network Integration Co., Ltd. (‘OKINET’) that will see the DiskSites VBranch WAFS and branch services technology integrated into its solutions sets. The resulting WAFS Solution will be distributed throughout Japan on OKINET’s RASE appliances. In a third partnership Expand Networks, a provider of Application Acceleration over WAN solutions, will OEM the DiskSites products. Expand will utilise DiskSites technology to deliver a comprehensive wide area file services (WAFS), branch level services and WAN optimization solution that is integrated at the hardware, software and management levels.

These new relationships combined with DiskSites ongoing development of its WANApp framework architecture should help organisations improve their use of modern WAN networks. Indeed, the solutions offered by DiskSites and its expanding partner base will be of interest to many organisations looking to centralise their IT whilst still delivering good, cost effective service to their customers, wherever they may be located. WAN optimisation is here to stay.