Cylink Corp. and Expand Networks Inc. are teaming up to deliver a way to compress traffic across VPN links, making it possible to keep down the cost of these connections.
The companies are working on joint marketing and sales agreements to push Cylink’s NetHawk VPN gear and Expand’s Accelerator equipment together. They will push the combination as a way to reduce the volume of traffic to storage area networks as well as a way to keep down the costs of business-continuity measures.
By compressing traffic with Expand devices before it is put on a VPN, customers can get by with smaller WAN connections because the traffic will be reduced 80 percent to 90 percent, Expand claims. This potential savings could be great for links to SANs, which handle a lot of traffic.
The Cylink-Expand cooperation can help business continuity in two ways. A customer that uses these devices will need smaller and therefore cheaper backup links that sit idle until primary links fail. Also, if a company is mirroring stored data at multiple sites, this equipment can reduce the bandwidth needed to duplicate this data to the backup sites.
Cylink and Expand have not yet announced details of their joint sales and marketing plans.