Bridgeworks and PeaSoup target the growing BUaaS and DraaS market

David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks, says their team plans to target the Backup-as-a-Service (BuaaS) and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DraaS) markets. Together they bring two key elements of the solution for cloud and mitigating the effects of wide-area network (WAN) latency and packet loss. “Peasoup with the cloud storage facility, and Bridgeworks with its PORTrockIT WAN Data Acceleration technology will allow Peasoup to geographically expand its user base without compromising their performance to provide enhanced recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for their customers”, reveals Trossell.  

Enhancing cloud solutions

Martin Bradburn, CEO of PeaSoup adds: “One of PeaSoup's missions is to evolve providing better services to the client. After an initial conversation with David Trossell at Bridgeworks in 2020, we felt that the WAN accelerator can enhance our cloud solutions and future development in immersive cooling technologies.”

“By working together, we’ll be able to deliver cloud solutions for offshore and to worldwide customers. By integrating WAN accelerators from Bridgeworks, we aim to provide high-quality services and by improving performance and acceleration of applications across WAN enabling the real-time collaborations. This business partnership also provides an additional enterprise class service and product portfolio.”

The partnership creates for the benefit of Bridgeworks and PeaSoup customers the opportunity to accelerate WAN data transfers across their entire networks. Together, they can also provide an integrated solution with a single point of contact for both technical and sales.

Critical: WAN acceleration

Bradburn explains why accelerating WAN data is often critical for many enterprises today – even for those based at opposite ends of the world, and thousands of miles apart from each other: “The businesses that decide to implement WAN data accelerators will be able to enhance productivity and speed up data transfers with minimum risk of data packet loss. This is critical for a highly sensitive data transfers for cloud back-up within government, medical or financial sectors and moving data from site-to-site or offshore.”

WAN data acceleration, also known as WAN Acceleration, is the only way to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss in any meaningful way. Traditionally, the answer has been to move data centres or disaster recovery sites closer to each other to reduce latency. However, if they are within the same circles of disruption this could lead to a calamity – whether that be caused by a natural disaster or by an incident caused by man that removes the potential of an organisation remaining operational.

Trossell elaborates: “As latency reduction, this is the conundrum that every Cloud BUaaS and DRaaS has to solve. If his potential customers are too far away, the effects of latency will affect his movement and especially when they are trying to recover the data from the cloud when everything has gone wrong.”

“For the XXaaS cloud provider to expand his user base, they have to bring facilities closer to the user base. With Bridgeworks’ PORTrockIT in their toolkit, the question of distance is removed. This allows PeaSoup to now target users from anywhere in Europe or even the East coast of the USA.”

WAN Optimisation tools

One of the other approaches to dealing with latency has been to use WAN Optimisation tools, which saw high demand during the limited internet bandwidth era. However, implementing them doesn’t necessarily improve the acceleration of data over a WAN, and they can’t cope with encrypted data. Even today’s cloud provider market is flooded with low-cost, bandwidth restricted platforms, and so Bradburn thinks that WAN accelerators could provide relief from latency while improving the WAN performance and reliability of data transfers in long-distance applications.

Modern WAN accelerators

“Modern WAN accelerators, utilising artificial intelligence (AI), are able to increase the performance of data transfer by removing acknowledgement of handshakes, normally associated with network security and collision detection process”, he says. He adds the process is “essential when the quality of data and maximum throughput with minimum latency are required.”

“Due to hardware used in network architecture WAN accelerators significantly reduce the effect of  latency, rather than removing it completely. Furthermore, these accelerators enable point-to-point connection for data transfer, removing from the network control of collisions and cumbersome data protection, assuring at the same time improved data delivery using around 98 per cent of available bandwidth, compared to less than 25 percent without.”

Solving challenges

So, how are Peasoup and Bridgeworks solving challenges related to BUaaS and DRaaS? WAN accelerators enable back-up data to move rapidly to an offsite location. The quality of data is improved too, as Bridgeworks PORTrockIT mitigates latency and packet loss. It also overcomes the physical limitations of the network. By reducing packet loss, it’s possible to improve the quality of the data that’s in transit. 

“During the back-up job, the accelerator uses real time optimisation techniques (usually AI) to maximise the available bandwidth, and also checks new data blocks against the one in the cache stopping all duplications”, explains Bradburn.

With hybrid cloud expected to be one of the key cloud trends during 2020, he adds that it has particularly been popular with organisations that want to use the cloud for storing data away from on-premise services with BuaaS and DraaS. To improve hybrid cloud, WAN accelerators perform cache checks with local storage to dedupe backup data quickly and without data packet loss. This would quote often normally involve an edge datacentre, which reduces the impact of latency by being close to the source of the data. Yet, with PORTrockIT, it’s now possible to do much the same miles apart.