Bridgeworks and IBM Partnering

Bridgeworks Limited, a storage protocol bridge manufacturer, announced IBM Corp.‘s certification of the its SANSlide Series 150 V7KSVC with IBM Storwize V7000 virtualised storage systems.

The combination of SANSlide and the Storwize V7000 provides a solution for those customers who require an efficient IP-based replication over long distances.

To date Bridgeworks has shipped and licensed over 25,000 products worldwide, helping organisations, maximising their existing investments in devices and SANs. This track record coupled with technology brought the two companies together to accelerate remote replication for customers across global networks.

An IDC study from July 2012 found that in many environments, creating and managing multiple copies of data has now exceeded the cost of primary storage, forcing many organisations to seek new ways of ensuring data availability, such as exploiting long distance IP replication. SANSlide’s acceleration of IP-based replication over long distances brings the next generation of optimisation to data-intensive industries.

Bridgeworks is a company that gives V7000 customers a supported, transparent technology that includes performance and reliability. With SANSlide’s protocol acceleration technology it is now possible to replicate data across continents in a cost efficient way with little or no loss in performance and improving bandwidth utilisation to over 95% instead of the 1-5% normally achieved in long-distance IP networks.

Randy Kerns, senior strategist at the Evaluator Group, said: "The Bridgeworks SANSlide brings an economical replication connection to the IBM Storwize V7000 with use of IP-based networking. With an effective utilisation of network bandwidth and simplicity of operation, the SANSlide should be very popular for remote replication with the V7000."

SANSlide is a block level storage protocol accelerator. By working at the block level, it allows the SANSlide node to connect directly to V7000/SVC and requires no modification to the V7000/SVC or to how the remote replication set-up is configured and administered. Unlike other acceleration methods, the type of data transmitted does not affect the performance of SANSlide. Encrypted, compressed, or video files – SANSlide handles them all without degradation of performance.

David Trossell, CEO of Bridgeworks, believes that the partnership with IBM is just one of the developments on the cards: "We have been around for 30 years and this is no small feat. We are the trusted experts in working with all the disparate storage protocols. Developments such as the partnership with IBM tell us that SANSlide with its ability to accelerate all the block level storage protocols for all storage technologies is the right solution at the right time. Customers in the US and Europe have achieved a near-immediate ROI with SANSlide. This is going to be a very exciting phase for the company."