The VAR Guy

Serving the WAN community can be a tricky area for VARs. It’s a delicate balance between the right tools, speed and reliability, and Infineta wants VARs to know it understands that perfectly. That’s why the company has launched the Infineta DMS Hyper-Scale WAN, promising 10Gbps and super-low port-to-port latency. I spoke to Haseeb S. Budhani, VP of products, and John Oh, VP of marketing about the new technology and Infineta’s plans for the channel …

First, the tech details: Infineta is promising “wire speed” data reduction with the new Infineta Data Mobility Switch (DMS), supporting 1Gbps+ speeds even under large network latencies as well as packet loss/congestion avoidance, allowing the DMS to potentially navigate, shape and control all the WAN traffic a company needs. Infineta promises built-in future-proofing and scalability, with the platform supporting the aforementioned 10Gbps, thanks to its de-duplication algorithm that was specifically designed with future data centers in mind. The backbone of all this brawn and WAN optimization is the Velocity Dedupe Engine (VDE), which Infineta claims is the “first-ever” hardware based data deduplication “core.”

The solution is designed to be a simple drop-and-go, one-stop-shop appliance. “Less boxes, less money. That’s important. But we’ve actually got an operational simplicity of [allowing] fewer boxes deployed inline on a trunk. No routers [are needed] to redirect traffic,” Budhani said.

The DMS is currently available with 2Gbps and 5Gbps, upgradable to 5 to 10Gbps by flicking a software switch. The price tag starts at $80,000.

Infineta’s just a startup right now, and it recently obtained $15 million in Series B venture capital funding. Both Budhani and Oh said it’s a little early for a full-blown channel program at Infineta, but the company plans to branch out slowly. “Initially, the jobs and projects we tend to get engaged in are data-center wide with strategic applications, critical applications. [For these] we’re going to use a direct model,” Oh said. “These are high-end products for high-end problems.”

But that’s not to say Infineta isn’t looking at the channel. “We’re going to use a couple route-to-market levels, [and right now] we have very engaged [select] partners. We’re engaged with half a dozen key partners and we plan to announce them throughout the rest of the year,” Oh said. “The boxes and products are channel-friendly. We’re able to get a box up and running in about 10 minutes or so,” which can be especially helpful for inter-data center deployments.

Infineta is taking this tack in part because of the nature of the technology it provides. “Nobody is solving the problem we’re solving,” Budhani said. It seems as though Infineta wants to make a name for itself. But the company is planning a direct vs. channel ratio of 80:20 percent in year one, and wants to scale it to 50-50 by year two or three.

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