Expand to deliver cache devices

ROSELAND, N.J. - Cache maker Expand Networks plans to debut a cache appliance this week aimed at making disaster recovery more affordable by reducing the amount of bandwidth it takes to keep back-up systems running.

The company will release Accelerator 1800, a low-end version of its Accelerator family, which includes the models 2750 and 4000 caches.

In addition to disaster recovery, Expand's caches are designed to deal with enterprise application data generated from large enterprise resource applications such as Oracle and Citrix's MetaFrame thin client/server software, the company says.

Web acceleration vendors such as Expand, F5 Networks, CacheFlow and Volera have started to target enterprise applications because the service provider market has been in decline, and because those users can benefit from the bandwidth savings and performance improvements the gear offers.

Expand's cache appliance is designed to store frequently accessed or redundant application data that takes up lots of bandwidth over WANs or LANs, such as e-mail headers and application data. The Accelerator 1800 serves information locally to users instead of having it travel across the network repeatedly. The caches typically sit in front of local application servers.

Pedro Calaco, vice president of marketing for Expand, says one of the biggest challenges companies face when trying to maintain a disaster-recovery system is the cost of a dedicated high-speed recovery network.

According to Gartner, up to 60% of companies do not have adequate disaster-recovery plans and systems - and a major obstacle is cost.

At Fairmont Supply, an industrial supply company in Canonsburg, Pa., Accelerator caches provided enough bandwidth savings to let the company move from a mainframe back office to a thin client Citrix-based environment without purchasing additional leased lines.

By using the Expand caches, Fairmont can cache the MetaFrame data and compress it, reducing the bandwidth requirements by 300% to 400%, says Roger Rush, a technical consultant for Fairmont and president of service provider Network Source One.

Expand competes with cache makers such as CacheFlow, Volera, Network Appliance and Stratacache. Expand's 1800 caches will be available this month, costing about $2,000. The caches have a dual-standard and Fast Ethernet port and support up to 128K bit/sec of traffic for as many as four IP tunnels.