New Data Center Architecture from Inkra Networks Enables Dedicated Services with Shared Economics.

Business Editors/High Tech Writers

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 19, 2002

In Trials with More Than Half a Dozen Leading Service Providers

and Enterprises, Including SAVVIS Communications and Morgan Stanley 

Inkra Networks today announced its new Virtual Service Architecture (VSA) that radically alters the economics of the data center. Integrating thousands of dedicated hardware, software, and service elements in a single, fully redundant system, Inkra's VSA enables service providers to satisfy enterprise demand for reliable, high-performance outsourced services--while breaking the operational barriers that, until now, have limited scalability and profitability. Thanks to the VSA, service providers can finally enjoy high margins on dedicated, hosted IT services, such as firewalls, virtual private networks (VPNs), load balancing, and SSL acceleration. The VSA also allows service providers to deliver services quickly and non-disruptively and to upsell new IT services to existing customers dynamically, with minimal human intervention. Moreover, the VSA enables real-time customer views of services delivered, thereby fostering the trust that IT managers need to confidently outsource critical services.

Inkra's VSA reduces operations and management expenses in large enterprise data centers while eliminating downtime for service upgrades. Enterprises can deploy the VSA to deliver a comprehensive set of dynamic IT services whose costs can be offloaded and tracked among individual departments and applications. For the first time, enterprises can quickly and gracefully meet the growing demand for sophisticated IT services in support of global business strategies.

Also today, Inkra introduced its Profit Center provisioning and management software suite for configuring, provisioning, monitoring, and billing for services deployed through the VSA. The Profit Center management suite integrates with a data center's existing operational system to automate service turn-up, monitoring, and billing. The Profit Center software is currently in trials with leading service providers, including SAVVIS Communications (Nasdaq: SVVS).

(Editor's Note: For additional details about service provider trials, see "Service Providers Bullish on Inkra Networks' New Hosting Architecture," also released today.)

"The data center is growing in importance, becoming the equivalent of the carrier CO for data rather than voice," said Sanjay Dhawan, president and CEO of Inkra Networks. "Yet the market is caught in a huge economic dilemma. End users want dedicated services, but service providers run up prohibitive operational expenses as they scale up to meet customer needs because they have to support a unique set of service appliances for each customer. Enterprises that run their own data centers face similar operational issues as they add redundancy, security, and performance enhancements. Before long, their data centers become extremely complex, which not only increases hard and soft costs, but also quickly limits their ability to integrate anything new or even to make changes. Incremental solutions from existing vendors, such as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks, just move the pieces around and don't solve the fundamental problems. Inkra designed its Virtual Service Architecture and Profit Center software specifically to fix these problems for growing data centers."

"Inkra has taken the right approach," said Robert A. McCormick, chairman and CEO of SAVVIS Communications. "They looked at current data center operations and actively sought to simplify them without compromising scalability, reliability, performance, and management. SAVVIS has taken a very similar approach to delivering our IP VPN services, so we are enthusiastic to work with Inkra to bring the same level of de-complexity to hosting." McCormick continued, "Working with Inkra will give us an elegant migration strategy to a much more efficient and profitable operational model. We have begun testing Profit Center and are looking forward to how it will integrate with our current operational support and billing systems and let us automate service processing and provisioning, which will mean we can offer a better service experience to our enterprise customers. We are now beginning to trial the Profit Center software in conjunction with the Inkra hardware platform."

"It's obvious that Inkra spent a lot of time analyzing data center operations," said Lance Braunstein, executive director of technical operations at Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MWD). "Inkra's VSA simplifies the rollout and operations of a multitier application infrastructure. VSA reduces network complexity and management requirements by integrating services from many appliances and creates an environment that improves today's installed products. Profit Center helps automate the application service environment and allows an operator to make changes to the system in real time without disrupting traffic flows. In the long term, VSA provides a flexible foundation that allows for the integration of new application services into a running system."

Inkra Networks plans to introduce its hardware platform based on the VSA as customer trials are completed.

Dirty Little Secrets of the Data Center

Data centers should be able to scale services and revenues without increasing costs, but traditionally, this hasn't been the case. Serving each customer has required dedicated hardware appliances, so operational costs and management complexity increase out of proportion to new revenue every time a customer or service is added.

In an attempt to introduce economies of scale to the data center, some vendors have developed integrated systems that allow service providers to create virtual service domains for hosting customers. Rather than having to configure individual racks of appliances to deliver individually tailored services to their subscriber base, service providers can use these integrated systems to support many customer service domains simultaneously. However, current integrated systems share memory and processing power across service domains, which can lead to resource contention, system vulnerability, and other performance issues.

Dedicated Services with Shared Economics

Inkra's VSA takes the concept of an integrated service platform to a new level by delivering dedicated services per customer that are supported with dedicated hardware and software resources, including bandwidth, processing MIPS, buffers, and memory. The Inkra VSA is the first data center architecture to deliver the economic benefits of logical integration while giving customers hardware-enforced, dedicated resources they desire for security, performance, and reliability. Customers can choose from dedicated firewall services, secure load balancing services (firewall and load balancing), performance services (SSL acceleration, TCP acceleration, and load balancing), or any service mix.

A critical element of the VSA is a technology known as HardWall. HardWall implements an independent service topology for each customer, providing the security and performance of dedicated hardware without the cost and complexity. HardWall tracks the bandwidth, processing MIPS, buffers, and memory used by each customer, isolates distinct data flows, and provides strict security barriers between service topologies.

Within the VSA, each service topology is fully dynamic, allowing data center operators to add, remove, configure, or upgrade services on the fly as customers purchase new services or new enterprise applications come online. Once a service topology is initially provisioned, the VSA requires zero system downtime for configuration changes. Data center operators can provision services in a matter of seconds, allowing them to respond immediately to change requests and, for the first time, to profitably upsell new services. They can even offer customers instant, "no-risk" trials of new services, since it is as simple for an operator to remove a service from a topology as it is to add a new one.

HardWall ensures that changes to one service topology--including software code revisions--have absolutely no effect on either the services or the performance of other topologies supported on the system. In the unlikely event that a service element fails, HardWall isolates the problem to the specific topology at fault. With HardWall, data center operators can even reboot a service topology without affecting the performance or services of any other topology. HardWall ensures that individual service provider customers or enterprise applications are isolated from each other and that each service topology continues to perform at peak levels.

While each customer service topology is both logically and physically distinct from those of other topologies, the VSA provides the data center operator with system-wide control and centralized oversight of all topologies. The VSA can support hundreds of separate service topologies in a single platform.

"There is no way to scale the `appliance model' that service providers use today to deliver dedicated services," said Andrew Schroepfer, president and founder of Tier 1 Research (Plymouth, Minn.). That's why the concept of integration is so attractive to them. At the same time, customers want the assurance of dedicated devices; they don't like to share resources with anyone. The Inkra VSA architecture addresses the service provider's scalability and management issues through logical integration while delivering the physical segregation customers demand."

Migration Preserves Existing Data Center Assets

While other integrated service platforms are designed only for new deployments, Inkra's VSA architecture is well designed from a migration standpoint as well, allowing data center operators to cable-in existing service appliances if they so desire. This feature is particularly attractive to enterprises and service providers that want to leverage existing appliances, such as firewalls and load balancers, currently in inventory.

Because each service topology is distinct inside the VSA, adding a standalone appliance is a simple matter of connecting it to ports on the system and re-routing the data flow within the Inkra system. Once connected, the standalone device can take advantage of VSA benefits, including zero-downtime service changes, HardWall resource management, accounting and usage tracking, and monitoring and management. Data center operators can even define internal VSA services as back-ups to the standalone device, providing automatic failover capability should the external unit malfunction.

"Too often companies become so enthralled with a new architecture that they overlook the migration strategy," said Michael Kennedy, co-founder and principal of Network Strategy Partners (Boston, Mass.). "Yet the reality is that customers have to make the most of their existing equipment to improve bottom-line assets. The Inkra VSA gives data center operators a way to make good use of their existing equipment while still reaping the strong operational benefits of integration. In this way, Inkra has made the buying decision a lot easier."

Comprehensive Provisioning and Management Suite

Inkra's Profit Center management suite delivers comprehensive, fine-grained control of the VSA. Profit Center lets data center operators establish simple, repeatable workflows to reduce the time, expertise, and personnel required to deliver and manage IP services for high-demand environments. Profit Center provides secure, customizable views of the VSA, or of individual topologies, to customers, account representatives, or others in the operations "food chain," according to access-control policies defined by the data center operator. Operators can thus distribute management functionality or tasks to specific groups for maximum operational efficiency. Profit Center comprises multiple components, including the Profit Center Server, Virtual Architect, and the Profit Link integration gateway.

Built with operators in mind, every Inkra hardware platform supports a standard command-line interface with Secure Shell (SSH), Syslog logging, and ASCII configuration. But for large-scale provisioning and management, operators will enjoy the automated features available through Profit Center Server, including point-and-click service definition and activation and real-time fault detection, management, and alerting. Profit Center Server allows operators to provision, report, and account for services across multiple customers, multiple VSA chassis, multiple service technologies, and even multiple geographic locations. To ensure that management services are always available, the Profit Center workload is automatically and transparently distributed across multiple servers. The result is true "lights-out" management.

With Virtual Architect, data center operators can visually design, test, and deploy service templates for error-free configuration and one-minute provisioning. An intuitive drag-and-drop application, Virtual Architect allows operators to simplify repetitive configuration tasks and to standardize and automate service creation, customization, and maintenance processes.

Profit Link is a bi-directional integration gateway that provides robust, out-of-the box integration with third-party billing, network management, trouble ticketing, and custom operations and support systems (OSSs). Using standard XML, XML SOAP, and SNMP interfaces, Profit Link provides a variety of programmable interfaces for inbound and outbound integration with third-party applications, such as Portal's Infranet(R) and the Remedy Action Request System, or with custom OSSs.

"Large service providers' back office software is overly complex and like a morass of molasses, and this not only increases operational costs, but also limits ability to build new revenue," said Michael Howard, principal analyst and co-founder at Infonetics Research, Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). "Major carriers know that their inability to quickly deliver services causes them to lose business to their competitors. Inkra tackled the biggest pain points in today's data centers--operations complexity, management, and billing--delivering a solution that simplifies the service provisioning process and reduces operational headaches and costs while increasing revenue potential."

About Inkra Networks

Inkra Networks is building a new class of data center switch that enables the rapid, non-disruptive, and secure delivery of IP services in enterprise and service provider data centers. Inkra's Virtual Service Architecture (VSA) changes the economics of IP service delivery by integrating thousands of firewall, VPN, load balancing, SSL, and other advanced IP service instances into a scalable platform with a superior management system. Inkra's VSA delivers the performance and integrity of today's dedicated service appliances at the economics of shared systems. Headquartered in Fremont, Calif., Inkra is funded by Battery Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Storm Ventures, and Greenstone Venture Partners. For more information, please visit www.inkra.com.