WAFS Market: Why Is It So Hot?
by Arun Taneja
Published July 2006; Posted December 2006

Abstract:

Products that provide wide area file services (WAFS) have taken off in the past few years. Here’s why.

Wide Area File Services (WAFS) products have now been shipping for about two years. IT and network managers who initially wondered, “What in the world is WAFS?” became curious (“What do they do?”), and then excited (“Wow!”). Today, most of them are deploying or evaluating WAFS solutions.

The main benefit to be derived from WAFS is the ability to improve data delivery to workers at remote sites, while saving money compared to alternative configurations and solutions.

The innovations of the four original WAFS players - Tacit Networks, Actona (now part of Cisco), DiskSites (now part of Expand Networks) and Riverbed Technology - have been recognized by the WAN optimization and other performance-enhancing appliance makers, as well as by the mainstream server and network equipment providers. Consequently, WAFS features are appearing on additional platforms and among the feature sets of additional devices.

This article explains how WAFS solve remote data access problems. We will also look at the four original WAFS players and a few others, then see where WAFS players are headed.
 

About the author:

Arun Taneja is founder and consulting analyst with Taneja Group, a firm specializing in providing analyst and consulting services to the storage and server markets.

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