The organisers say the awards are designed to reward and promote excellence in the data centre arena, recognising:“…the achievements of the vendors and their business partners alike and this year encompass a wider range of both facilities and information technology award categories designed to address all of the main areas of the data centre market in Europe.”

Industry validation

In celebration, David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks comments: “This win validates the expertise of the Bridgeworks team and PORTrockIT’s ability to mitigate latency and reduce packet loss by using a winning combination of AI, machine learning and WAN Data Acceleration to achieve higher levels of WAN performance than would normally be possible with WAN optimisation and even with SD-WANs alone,” he adds before commenting that the company’s development of new commercial relationships is also part of its growing success story.

“Our achievement is significant – particularly as it’s not the first time we’ve beaten off some stiff competition from the mainstream WAN optimisation and SD-WAN competitors at the DCS Awards in the same category”, he says.

PORTrockIT integration

Bridgeworks’ WAN Data Acceleration solution, PORTrockIT, is integrated into a leading Nordic IT infrastructure company’s IBM Spectrum Protect offerings for high-speed disaster recovery. That organisation has a turnover at £3bn, over 7,400 employees in 87 offices across seven countries, where they provide IT infrastructure services for businesses and organisations in Europe’s Nordic region.

With the support of its technology partners – including Bridgeworks – this Nordic IT infrastructure company provides a full range of products and services across IT infrastructure. One of those products includes Back-up-as-a-Service (BaaS) and by implementing Bridgeworks WAN Data Acceleration solutions, the company can now offer international clients improved WAN data recovery and back-up performance.

The performance objectives were achieved with IBM Spectrum Protect for the BaaS using Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) as the methodology.The network latency within Nordic Region was 9 milliseconds with a WAN link of 10Gb/s with 2.5GBs used for the solution.

Velocity: shortening distance

Many BaaS and DRaaS providers are restricted by distance before the effects of latency force them to build more access points, closer to their customers. With WAN Data Acceleration product PORTrockIT, the “reach out” from a single data centre can be massively enlarged. This means a single BaaS or DRaaS data centre can cover a greater geographical area, reducing the needs for subsidiary access points and therefore lowering their costs whilst retaining LAN-like performance.

To prove the point that PORTrockIT is a true global infrastructure product, Bridgeworks worked alongside the Nordic IT company to secure a BaaS client transfer from the east coast of America to their Nordic data centre. The capacity utilisation of the WAN link between the two sites increased dramatically from less than 5% to 98% of the maximum throughput.

Data centre savings

With the help of PORTrockIT, the Nordic IT infrastructure company has managed to achieve cost-savings with their BaaS offering. Trossell explains:

“Due to the impact of latency on service performance, this firm was contemplating 4 new data centres be built across Europe. By using PORTrockIT, the do not need to build new data centres and short-term savings are upwards of €150M,” says Trossell.” He added “that not only has this reduced their costs but has dramatically increased their geographical market size.

PORTrockIT is deployed by companies such as IBM, Commvault, NetApp, and CVS Healthcare to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss by using machine learning and artificial intelligence in ways that traditional WAN optimisation and SD-WAN solutions often fail to achieve. This is evidenced in the many articles that David Trossell has written for the leading IT publications, such as DCS.