WAFs are the way of the future for global sharing
WAFs are the way of the future for global sharing
July 19, 2005: This is the message from Brocade, which claims that although it is early days for Australian organisations to fully appreciate the advantages of WAFs, they will eventually realise that these WAFs can serve their growing need to share information between countries.
Graham Schultz, the country manager for A/NZ, said that he expects WAFs to have a big global impact in the Asia Pacific region, where organisations routinely send files between countries with varying bandwidth capabilities over satellite, microwave or fibre links, thus causing delays in data sharing over long distances.
He said that WAFs solve the distance challenge by enabling regional offices to share data at local area network (LAN) speeds, reducing delays in sending and receiving files between global offices and increasing data integrity for compliance.
"75 percent of the data is stored outside of the data centre for most organisations. The data stored in remote locations needs to be tightly controlled and managed to ensure that everything meets compliance requirements.
"The WAFs allow users to achieve virtually LAN speeds over large distances. They also ensure that these systems are more secure too. It also allows companies to scale up because they can continue to deploy more WAFs."
Steve Duplessie, the founder of the enterprise strategy group, also praised the value of these systems.
"As customers continue to look for ways to reduce the cost, compliance, and complexity of their computing environments, the ability to manage compute, application and file resources dynamically will play an important role in lowering the customer's operating costs."
In addition, Schultz said that the new release of Brocade's Tapestry Application Resource Manager would reduce the time it takes to task from hours to minutes.
ARM is expected to allow enterprise customers to consolidate their resources as they move to higher-density and bladed server computing environments, because they need efficient shared storage architectures to improve data access and management.
It is designed to automate and manage the complex relationships between server hardware, operating system images, application software and data, and storage resources, to lower operating cost through automated and rapid deployment.
Schultz believes that Tapestry ARM will be a major facilitator of utility computing.
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