Just how does Bridgeworks do it? To add to its credits, the Lymington-based WAN Acceleration firm has won another award for its unique technology. The firm’s drum roll of its wins goes back several years, showing future promise too – as shown by its continuing success at the DCS Awards 2024.
June 20, 2024
The award: Data Centre ICT Networking Innovation of the Year. It wasn’t the only cause for celebration on the night of 23rd May 2024 at the Leonardo Royal Hotel in St. Pauls, London. In the category, ‘Data Centre Intelligent Automation/Management Innovation of the Year,’ Bridegeworks also came runner-up.
Rewarding industry recognition
The CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks remarks: “It was a great night, and we are pleased that we as a team are continuing to attract recognition for our WAN and data acceleration technologies. They are unique in the way they use artificial intelligence, machine learning and data parallelisation to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss.”
Was it disappointing to not win the ‘Data Centre Intelligent Automation/Management Innovation of the Year award?’ Yes, but it gives the Bridgeworks’ team confidence, knowing they’re hitting the right beat with their patented technologies. It will also help them in their campaign to spread the company’s commercial and operational reach internationally in the U.S and in Europe.
The firm’s technology is used by organisations such as the National Institutes of Health in the United States. Although it can’t make the results of its improved performance public, the work with the NIH represents a significant multimillion U.S. dollar control. Moreover, US-based company, CVS Caremark, connected two virtual tape libraries over 2,860 miles at full WAN bandwidth, and achieved a performance gain of 95 times the unaccelerated performance.
Accelerating BlackPearl, Securing Data
Spectra Logic: “In our tests, PORTrockIT accelerated BlackPearl’s replication performance significantly – in one case, completing the job more than 5 times faster.”
A Spectra Logic BlackPearl case study was used for its entries to this year’s awards. BlackPearl helps businesses to create and maintain geographically dispersed archives, while PORTrockIT contributes by mitigating the risk of losing valuable data – making it easier to demonstrate compliance with data retention regulations.
To demonstrate improved results with PORTrockIT for BlackPearl customers, Bridgeworks conducted a set of performance tests in the UK. The test infrastructures mimicked a real-world BlackPearl architecture, using an “Injector” server to inject or extract files from BlackPearl, and a WANulator to simulate different levels of latency across a wide area network. The BlackPearl console and recorded performance figures.
Three tests assessed WAN data transfer performance at various simulated levels of latency. The WANulator also simulated a nominal packet loss rate of 0.1%, representing a typical service-level agreement from most WAN providers.
Unaccelerated Results
The results of 2 of the tests conducted – used without PORTrockIT, but with unaccelerated network architecture, show a negative correlation between latency and performance. As latency increases, average transfer rates (ATR) decline. We see a longer total time to completion (TTC). For example, in Test 1, the TTC was 119 minutes when there was 20 ms of latency, but it rose to 246 minutes at 100 ms of latency – more than twice as long.
In the second test, the results were similar: the TTC was 78 minutes at 20 ms of latency, but 157 minutes at 100 ms of latency – more than double the transfer’s TTC. In a real-world scenario, this variability in TTC would be a major concern. Any unexpected increase in latency could cause transfers to time-out or overrun their scheduled window – putting valuable business data at risk.
Acceleration with PORTrockIT
With architecture accelerated by PORTrockIT, the results are very different. At all levels of latency, the ATR improves dramatically when PORTrockIT is activated. For example, in Test 1, the worst-case ATR of the accelerated architecture (365 MB/s at 100 ms of latency) is more than 2.5 times as fast as the best-case ATR of the unaccelerated architecture (145 MB/s at 20 ms of latency). PORTrockIT keeps TTC stable, regardless of latency.
In the first test, the shortest TTC was 39 minutes at 20 ms of latency. The longest was 46 minutes at 100 ms of latency. In Test 2, the fastest TTC was 36 minutes and the slowest 43 minutes. That’s a difference of just 7 minutes between the slowest and fastest transfers. Real-world users can expect their transfers to complete on time, even if latency increases.
Test 3 demonstrates that with Bridgeworks WANrockIT, a WAN acceleration product for SAN protocols, Spectra Logic customers cannot only geographically separate their BlackPearl instances, but also use a third geographical site for air-gapped tape storage facilities – with no performance penalties associated with latency and packet loss.
Promising future
The Bridgeworks’ team is keen to continue their success over the course of the next year and beyond. To that end, the company plans to enter other industry awards, to showcase its technologies, and to support STEM education in its local area.
