Infineta and the Internet Research Group (IRG) released a study about the disruptors and challenges that exist in the inter-data center WAN environment handling big data workflows.

The paper starts out by highlighting the main advantages of big data environments. Enterprises can lower storage costs while increasing scalability as they analyze their unstructured data.  Citing a recent McKinsey Big Data Report, Infineta’s study demonstrates the value proposition by noting a $300 billion annual opportunity for the healthcare industry, which leaves 95 percent of its data unanalyzed.

The study also highlighted the drawbacks that traditional WAN imposes on a big data environment. The main issues are around latency; the lack of available bandwidth in WAN infrastructure already used by companies, and the increasing demand driven by growing amounts of data. This problem is amplified because traditional WAN optimization solutions are designed for low-capacity branch WAN.

“Big Data by its very nature requires new methods of approaching underlying infrastructure, because traditional methods simply won’t work ,” said Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst, The Wikibon Project. “As CIOs look to deploy technologies such as Hadoop, they are looking for guidance on how to maximize value from Big Data deployments. IRG and Infineta have identified and validated information that provides a useful roadmap to IT executives faced with new data-intensive environments.”

Infineta’s flagship Data Mobility Switch (DMS) solution is designed to address these issues. The main advantage according to the company is that it’s specifically optimized for large-scale big data deployments. DMS uses a hardware-based approach in order to reduce port to port latencies to about 50 microseconds, and it can be scaled to support 10 Gbps networks. The company’s latest twist is a pay-and-you go solution based on DMS, which aims to further lower the costs for customers.