Expand Networks and Vision Solutions Team Up

Expand Networks, a provider of application acceleration solutions over the wide area network (WAN), announced a strategic partnership with Vision Solutions, Inc., who offer the high availability, disaster recovery and data management solutions for the IBM System i and System p markets. The partnership will enable faster backup and recovery times over the WAN for Vision customers, while Expand customers can be assured that their WAN Optimization solutions will work seamlessly with Vision’s business continuity offerings.

The synergy of the two companies will enable organizations to keep data secure, and ensure quick recovery in the event of disruption or failure, regardless of physical location of stored data, all while WAN resources are maximized. In addition, Vision resellers will be able to enhance and extend their product portfolios with Expand’s industry leading, best of breed WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products.

The very nature of distributed IT environments and WANs can present challenges when it comes to securing and accessing data. Especially when it comes to moving large amounts of data, the latencies and bandwidth variations that can occur across a WAN may lead to extensive backup and recovery windows.

"Expand Networks speeds backup, replication and high availability times by leveraging the entire WAN bandwidth, mitigating performance and latency issues, which will allow Vision Solutions’ customers to use Expand Networks’ WAN Optimization solutions to further maximize IT networks resources," commented Robert Johnson, SVP of Sales, Vision Solutions. "This is really all about synergies–getting optimum benefit from the combined resources of Expand and Vision."

Expand’s compression and caching techniques effectively deliver up to 10 times the available throughputs, completing such tasks in a fraction of the time that they used to take. Furthermore, customers can now run such traffic during production hours without having an impact on higher priority user based traffic. This enables Vision Solutions’ customers to not only achieve the data protection assurances that they need, but even adhere to more strict backup, replication and high availability policies than would otherwise be possible.

"This is a strategic alliance that will allow Expand to benefit from Vision Solutions’ established expertise in high-availability, disaster recovery and data management solutions and, for Vision Solutions to enhance its portfolio with our WAN Optimization products," said Andrew Mullen, Vice President of Sales of the Americas for Expand Networks. "Together with Vision Solutions and their extensive worldwide partner network, we can bring innovative offerings to a wide range of customers to meet their ever increasing needs for WAN Optimization in support of business initiatives. In fact, we are already beginning to see large opportunities developing from this relationship."

Expand Networks has grown to be the leading provider of Application Acceleration solutions over the WAN with 3500+ customers and over 40,000 units installed. Noted Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa recently said of the company’s offerings: "These integrated solutions appeal to CIOs and IT/network architects because of their powerful functionality, and simplicity of implementation and ongoing management, while providing a framework that accommodates future challenges and growth."

Explains one customer, Burt Silverman, Vice President of Information Technology, Nu Horizons: "The nature of disaster recovery and the Vision Solution lends itself to the Expand acceleration capabilities because of the way the integrated solution technically mirrors the data between the two machines on a constant basis. It’s a one-two punch with WAN acceleration."

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