There’s a lot of changes stirring about the cloud, and as the enterprise furthers its transition to virtualized services, even eliminating hardware in some cases, optimization is key.  Bridging the standards that got us here with the standards of the future, hardware and software companies alike are seeking the best ways to make their components work together, striking a balance somewhere down the line.  For Infineta, this transition brings an opportunity for a new hardware solution that acknowledges the cloud’s evolving standards, delivering a breakthrough product for WAN optimization.

Fresh off a $15 million Series B funding round (bringing Infineta’s total amount raised to $30 million), the start-up is looking to speed traffic flow between data centers, and optimize bandwidth utilization.  The latest investment hails from Rembrant Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners, coming together to back a technology that’s been in development for two years.  Infineta is launching its flagship product this week, called the Data Mobility Switch.  It’s a hard-ware based product that improves performance across wide-area networks, increasing capacity between 5x and 10x.

The result is “fatter pipes” without the extra parts, presenting an economic solution for scaling out, limiting the need to scale up with new fibers or network ports.  Unlike Akamai’s hybrid cloud optimization method, Infineta compresses and dedupes algorithms that run network traffic, streamlining the bottleneck and working with existing data center setups.  Infineta is positioning its product for an array of scenarios, from simple availability to disaster recovery, encouraging the build outs for dynamic clouds that need to move applications between distributed data centers in various locations.  It’s this interactivity amongst data centers that Infineta is really optimizing for.

Infineta co-founder and CEO Raj Kanaya recognized early on that big data is becoming a pertinent aspect of cloud services, delivery, storage and access, noting the trend towards the interactions amongst data centers, not so much end users.  It’s because of all the back up and storage we’re doing in the cloud now that inter-data center activity is on the rise, increasing the need to optimize at this level.  For Kanaya and his start-up, it’s a chance for Infineta’s unique technology to make a stand.

“Both emerging and established companies are evolving their network infrastructures as part of the transition over to a cloud era so that they can tap into the significant cost and performance benefits afforded by resource pooling, network convergence, and the simplification of IT services,” says Kanaya.

“The premium in the next decade of IT will be the simplified and accelerated movement of massive amounts of data that underpins scale-out big data processing (compute), cross-site virtualization (server), and large volume data replication (storage). Infineta’s DMS makes this critical traffic move faster for significantly less cost.”