Infineta Unveils Networking 'Dedupe Engine'

Silicon Valley startup Infineta Systems unveiled its Velocity Dedupe Engine Monday at EMC World in Boston. The patent-pending technology is described as massively parallel data reduction technology for 10 Gigabit SAN replication, data migration, backup and emerging private cloud applications.

Not wanting to compare their technology with other vendors, Infineta is saying that the Velocity Dedupe Engine is the industry's first hardware-based reduction technology that offers new levels of throughput, scalability and bandwidth capacity for addressing the explosion in data center-to-data center traffic.

Targeting large enterprise customers, Infineta hopes to enable a global area network of pooled resources, building a inter-data center fabric.  A company sponsored study completed by Forrester showed large enterprises with $1 billion or more in revenues will experience at least a doubling or tripling of their data center-to-data center traffic in the next 2-4 years.

James Hamilton explains the technology in a recent blog post as similar to storage deduplication:

James continues to explain the three methods used by Infineta - hardware based on FPGA  (Field Programmable Gate Array ), fixed-sized, full packet block size, bounded index exploiting locality and heuristic signatures.

Infineta also announced that it has received a $15 million round of funding with backing from Alloy Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners.

"When looking at investing in Infineta, we saw a company entering the market during a perfect storm in business and IT today, where traffic volumes are exploding at the exact same time that cost considerations are of paramount importance to today’s enterprises," said Ammar Hanafi, General Partner, Alloy Ventures.

A full lineup of products built around the Infineta Velocity Dedupe Engine will be generally available in the second half of 2010.