Features - Storage Innovations:

TACIT NETWORKS DELIVERS LAN-SPEED ACCESS TO DATA OVER WANS

With a recent announcement at Giga's Emerging Technology Showcase of a product line that delivers local area network (LAN) speed access to data over wide area networks (WANs), Tacit Networks Inc has established itself as a leader in enterprise-class WAN-based storage consolidation.

Tacit Networks Storage Caching Appliances give enterprises a way to consolidate storage assets into one centrally managed data center, making it easier to manage backups, storage procurement and provisioning, status monitoring, and disaster recovery from one central geographic location. The company is fully operational with product ready to ship.

Even the fastest WAN connections introduce latencies that can make file sharing impractical across dispersed enterprises. Tacit Networks SC/IP (Storage Caching/Internet Protocol) is a distributed, fault tolerant protocol that is optimized for these high latency environments. Tacit Networks storage caching technology dramatically reduces networking and collaboration costs over remote sites, simplifies management through consolidation and centralization of storage, and boosts productivity of valuable knowledge workers.

"We essentially make the WAN 'disappear', so that it doesn't really matter to the end user where their files are physically stored," said Tim Williams, Chairman and CEO of Tacit Networks. "This is a real breakthrough for enterprises trying to balance the need to add storage over increasingly dispersed operations with the desire to simplify provisioning and management via centralization and consolidation of storage assets."

Unlike traditional Web caching devices and content delivery networks, with Tacit Networks the cached data is live, writable and coherently sharable with other caching devices located in authorized remote locations. Users experience LAN-speed access to data, even though the data is stored remotely in a data center connected by a WAN. Tacit Networks' products are interoperable with existing storage, network and hardware infrastructure.

"Web caching clearly demonstrated how much Internet performance could be improved by moving important, often used data closer to the user," said Peter Christy, cofounder of the infrastructure analyst firm NetsEdge Research Group "As use of the Internet moves to the more valuable but challenging tasks of mainstream enterprise IT, the requirement shifts from the caching and acceleration of Web objects to that of general purpose file system acceleration across the network. Tacit is a technically savvy and experienced team who clearly understand how to do just that. We expect the application impact to be every bit as great as it was for Web objects."

Tacit Networks Storage Caching Product Line

The Tacit Storage Cache attaches directly to the LAN at a remote site and connects back to a Tacit Cache Server in the data center through a gateway using standard virtual private network (VPN) Internet connections. From the LAN user's perspective, the Storage Cache appears to be a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, providing access to shared files using standard file sharing protocols like CIFS (for Windows) and NFS (for Unix). No changes need to be made to the client computers on the LAN. After its initial configuration, the Tacit Storage Cache requires no further administration, backup or management of any kind. It is completely managed, monitored, provisioned and replicated from a remote data center.

The Tacit Cache Server is a thin appliance that sits in front of a network attached storage (NAS) system at the data center and coordinates access by multiple remote Storage Caches to the consolidated storage resources. It is designed to use, complement, and easily integrate with existing NAS and storage area network (SAN) infrastructures at the data center. The Tacit Cache Server simplifies data management for enterprises through consolidation of storage.

The distributed, network fault-tolerant protocol SC/IP (Storage Caching/Internet Protocol) is run between the Tacit Storage Caches and the Tacit Cache Server. This protocol is optimized for high latency environments. It uses compression and file differencing to minimize the amount of data transferred over the network. Since the files cached in the Tacit Storage Caches are replicas of the data center files, the product extends the benefits of data center consolidation, central management and disaster recovery.

Using advanced read/write caching technology, Tacit Cache Appliances have the ability to serve the entire enterprise file data on the local LAN. Simultaneously, Tacit Networks provides multi-site cache coherency, allowing the Tacit Cache Server to support multiple Tacit Storage Caches at different locations caching the same, complete data set.

Tacit storage caching solutions are ideal for global enterprises that need to share data in real time. Tacit Networks enables WAN file sharing and collaboration at LAN speeds while allowing data to reside on consolidated storage at the data center for centralized management and control.

About Tacit Networks

Tacit Networks, based in Somerset, NJ, is a leader in enterprise-class WAN-based storage consolidation solutions delivering LAN speed access to data over the WAN. Tacit Networks builds appliances that cache file sharing operations. Much like Web caching appliances that improve the performance of content delivery networks, Tacit Storage Caching Appliances dramatically improve the performance of file sharing over WANs. But unlike Web caching devices, the cached data is live, writable and coherently sharable with Tacit caching devices located in authorized remote locations. The company's enterprise-class storage networking expertise is built upon the management, research and engineering teams' track records of success in mission critical storage, both at the software and systems levels.

For more information on Tacit Networks Storage Caching solutions, call 732-805-9950 or visit Tacit Networks on the Web at www.tacitnetworks.com.

Contact: Jeff Helthall of Tacit Networks Inc, 973-452-2349, jeff@tacitnetworks.com.