In preparation for the release I browsed the competitor’s sites to see what they were up to, and I found a new demonstration video on a major vendor’s site. I’ll not name names, I’m not trying to start a fight. They were trying to show how much they could improve the experience for a SharePoint user, and since that’s a big focus for us too, I took a look.  Simple demo:  4Mbps link with 75ms latency,  21MB Excel document being opened from a SharePoint site.  So consider this: without acceleration the spreadsheet took 64 seconds to open.   Next they show the first pass with WAN optimization enabled – as the download progresses they claim that the link is being accelerated 10-fold to 40Mbps.  If so opening the file would have taken about 6 seconds, but it actually took…  32 seconds.  Ok so they’ve halved the time (so maybe doubled the effective link speed) and that’s more or less what I would expect from a cold pass where compression is doing most of the work. The claim about a 10-fold accelration to 40Mbps is inconsistent with the observed behaviour and frankly ludicrous, but moving on…  Finally, they do a hot pass, and the file opens in… 14 seconds.   Now that was very surprising to me, I was expecting much more improvement than that.

So out of curiousity this morning I set up a 4Mbps link with 75ms latency and introduced it as a ”hop” in the connection between my laptop and a real SharePoint site in the Cloud. I then created a 25MB Excel spreadsheet using absolutely real data from financial forecasts, employee data, pricing information etc – so no cutting and pasting to create an unrealistically “de-duplicatable” file.  I put the file into a SharePoint doc library and began testing. Without any WAN acceleration the file took 111 seconds to open.  The first cold pass took 56 seconds to open the file – so as I would have predicted, (and just like the competitor) a cold pass halves the time or doubles the effective speed.  Now a hot pass: the file opened in 19 seconds.  So with Replify Accelerator, the hot pass is not twice as fast as the cold pass, it’s three times faster.  Or put another way,  for the competitor the difference between no acceleration and a hot pass is about x4.5,  and with Replify Accelerator it’s almost x6.   Or in tabular form:

I knew we were good, but I didn’t realize we are that much better than the competition.   We’re not standing still either, the 4.1 release is going to deliver a significant further speed increase as a result of some research we’ve been doing with Queen’s University over the last six months.

Here’s what we’ve got:

1) MAPI over HTTPS – we’ve supported vanilla MAPI for some time, but now we support the flavor of MAPI you’ll be using with Office365, and maybe already use within your own organization if you like to make it easy for people to access email outside the firewall.

2) Auto-configuration of the VA connection – virtual appliances will now try the various connection possibilities for themselves to find out what works and then save that configuration. To work well in any environment, our accelerator client must understand the nuances of the network between the user and our virtual appliance.  The Accelerator client will now determine automatically any proxy or firewalls getting in the way of its connection to the virtual appliance, and determine the most appropriate route for connection.  This avoids additional configuration during installation.

3) Resource management – one of the challenges of providing WAN Optimization as a “virtual” appliance, is that we can’t be sure whether a customer is sizing the system realistically, or just loading it up with more users and applications and hoping for the best. With 4.0 the system will monitor consumption of cpu, memory, connections, and when it hits thresholds (which can be modified by an informed user) it will reject further users and send them directly to the application without any optimization

4) Health dashboard – each VA now has a handy dashboard which allows you track a slew of resource measures in detail and allocate more resources when necessary

5) Lots of point improvements to performance and usability

And of course CLAN is available for selected customers

New users and trial customers will get the release via the download links right away.  Existing user’s clients will not flag the  availability of the new release right away. That’s because one of the changes we’ve made requires that the VA be upgraded before the clients in certain use cases, and we don’t want anyone to lose connectivity.

And now for something completely different. I pulled out the user manuals for our Riello UPS  recently and was intrigued by an envelope that fell out.  Inside was a little plastic Riello logo along with an installation guide  (see below) explaining how to stick it to the device correctly depending on whether the UPS was horizontally or vertically mounted in the rack.  I was initially incredulous and then laughed like a loon. 

Is this an elaborate practical joke to be applauded, or lunacy from some totally humorless Brand manager at Riello? I can’t make up my mind whether this is the silliest thing I’ve ever seen, or my satire detection has completely failed.

Given that the Riello logo looks like a question mark  compounds the “what the *?#$ ?” feeling.

Check it out if you want to find out about our successful deployment in the largest eLearning network in Europe, and to see a cool demo of our new CLAN capability. The photo on the right shows a potential customer glazing over as I rave on enthusiastically about patented algorithms for determining how “hot” shared content is. Eventually he took a nose bleed and left but I’m sure it was to get his cheque book.

Here’s an example comment from a visitor http://twitter.com/pcscomputing/statuses/67966468247130113, and one from a senior analyst http://clausegge.com/2011/05/replify-co-operative-lan/

I took the photo driving out of Liverpool on my way to the show on Monday by the way.  No pot of gold but an uplifting sight nonetheless.

By the time this blog goes live, 3.6 will be available for trial, and as a free upgrade for all customers currently in-support. Your Replify clients will start popping up little messages to tell you that the new client is available but if you want to check out the contents before you proceed with an upgrade, take a look at the release notes.

As well as testing until our eyes-bulged, we’ve been taking time out to brief analysts on our strategy – that’s always a little nerve-racking because if the analysts don’t “get it” right away, that can either mean you’re ahead of the game (which can be good), or that you’re heading in the wrong direction (which is never good). We’ve come away from those sessions very encouraged – the analysts all “got it” and could see the value of the “hardware-free WAN optimization” and mainly differed in how quickly they thought the market would embrace it. I think that puts the onus back on Replify to get into CLAN customer trials at the earliest opportunity and make our point. Actions speak louder than words here.  We wrapped-up our analyst piches with the following manifesto, which sums up our proposition nicely: 

The trends of mobility, collaboration and cloud drive us towards the need for a new user-centric approach

Personal WAN optimization is already valuable but undervalued

…with CLAN it becomes fully the equal of existing solutions but without the cost and complexity

Add offline working and you have the most complete solution for remote and mobile workers, and consumers of cloud services

This is a fairly large release of Accelerator – no really big individual features (saving that for CLAN next quarter) but many small additions and improvements.

In no particular order:

- Improvements to our handling of CIFS which give a performance boost for scenerios such as viewing folders with large number of files.

- Support of WFP (Windows Filtering Platform) in Windows 7. This replaces the DNE packet interception that we used to use and has several benefits; improved throughput,  no need to restart after installation, and no tripping over inconsiderate DNE based products like CheckPoint VPN.

- Firewall friendly mode – requires only two ports to be opened in the firewall (or one if you’re not using SSL).  You can use port 80 if you like.

- Full service configurability – you can choose to intercept any protocol on any port, and choose which optimizations you wish to apply e.g. compression only, de-duplication, the whole shooting match.

- Replify Backup Accelerator – a new *personality* for the Accelerator so that if you’ve bought a license key purely for back-up acceleration, the product presents you with a very simple set of configuration screens and self-configures for DoubleTake, EqualLogic or any other similar product.

- A slew [Irish Gaelic sluagh, multitude, from Old Irish slúag.] of performance and usability improvements.

- There might be a couple of bug fixes in there too.  Ok, I admit it, there are several bug fixes in there.

There’s also a cunning little hidden feature which gives a boost to the PC client performance if you don’t mind using more memory. Enabled on request

I feel they may have underestimated the breadth of our capability a little; I guess all the vendors will feel that way to a degree, but I think they described our strategy clearly and I was delighted  that we were awarded “Best Mobility Strategy” based on our leadership in the remote and mobile user space.  That is indeed our focus; it’s a significant and rapidly growing proportion of enterprise knowledge workers and the main players pay relatively little attention to it, in some cases offering much reduced functionality compared to their site-level WOCs.  When we release CLAN later this year, we’ll take the mobility play to a whole new level and close the gap between site and individual acceleration results.

Russian language version

Replify will be formally unveiling its CLAN technology at Internet World in May this year.  The event, held at Earl’s Court in London, hosts over 300 solution providers and 12,000 visitors, combining five shows in one event. We’ve chosen this event because of its exciting combination of themes including: cloud, content management, and e-business.

Replify’s CLAN feature delivers serverless WAN optimization to co-located users, with the levels of acceleration previously only associated with shared site appliances.   CLAN allows groups of users to dynamically bind and share their personal caches, to create a Virtual shared cache, with de-duplication for all common accessed content.  No other product today has this feature, allowing enterprises to remove further cost and complexity from their IT infrastructure while delivering the WAN optimization they need.

Come along and see how our small footprint  PC client delivers true usability for remote applications and content, and provides LAN-like performance for collaborating workers, without the need to deploy anything into a site. 

CLAN is going to change the whole paradigm for WAN optimization – for site-to-site,   site-to-cloud,  user-to-site and user-to-cloud.   We believe that within a couple of years few organizations will even consider deploying expensive to purchase,  and expensive to support,  tin boxes to deliver the application acceleration that distributed working and cloud services demand.