A better solution..

Sales and Marketing people will sell you anything that moves, if you're paying, they're selling. They don't care if its the right solution, they don't even care if it does what you think it should do, they just want your money and make the sale. Companies don't keep using their products because its the best product, they keep using the product because they spent too much money on it and don't want to admit to their boss that it was a bad decision. I'm not too fond of technology marketing people!

Spliced Networks is a company built by engineers. Our mission statement is simple and accurate - "Build innovative and secure solutions for the Enterprise Network..", in other words a better solution. We won't sell you anything unless we believe it is the most innovative and most secure solution you can buy today. If its missing something you need, we'll create it and on many occasions, build you something even better.

Spliced Networks is dedicated to building faster, more secure and more innovative server and network appliance solutions. You won't find us mucking about with X-Windows, KDE or Gnome. The fact that we don't care about X-Windows or need to support it, enables us to offer far superior security solutions that other vendors have to sweep under the rug.

AppOS 4.0.0 is nearing FCS, when its released, servers will never be the same again!

SquashFS with LZMA integrated into AppOS 4.0

LZMA is one of the best compression algorithms out there. SquashFS, as we've known for years is one of the best compressed filesystems you can get for Linux. As well as its security side effect benefits that we use with AppOS. We have been looking at SquashFS w/LZMA and have decided to integrate it into AppOS 4.0. SquashFS w/LZMA offers about 20MB/sec transfer rates on decryption, and so there is no performance impact with using it in AppOS. However, its looking to offer a 10% improvement over regular gzip'd based SquashFS.

You can get a copy of SquashFS with LZMA from here.

Spliced Networks adds 100MBit/sec in Chicago

We are very pleased to announce that we have added 100MBit/sec of bandwidth and servers in Chicago. We expect the new addition to go into production by the weekend. This move wraps up Phase II of our network expansion. Chicago is a key location, as it fills a void, prior to this the mid-west was served by either Houston, Atlanta or Philadelphia. The bandwidth to our headquarters in Athens also terminates in Chicago, so this move enables us to provide fast access to additional services and equipment for our partners and customers.

Spliced Networks acquires stealth startup

Spliced Networks will ring in the new year with the acquisition of a networking related stealth startup. The deal was signed and secured over the weekend. With this acquisition, Spliced Networks will extend its product portfolio to complete with Cisco, Vyatta and offer virtual layer 2-7 switching for use in blade and virtualized environments.

The benefits of this acquisition will be seen quickly, as Spliced Networks plans to ship the startup's Application Switch Accelerator during Q1 2008. An application switch is an advanced load balancing switch which has SSL acceleratior and DoS attack protection capabilities built in. The Application Switch Accelerator is designed to enhance existing Application Switch deployments by off-loading some of the CPU intensive tasks that limit the scalability of aging Application Switches. The accelerator allows customers to continue to enjoy the ROI on existing application switch deployments.

The acquisition will allow Spliced Networks to position AppOS to compete against VMware's Enterprise product line in 2008.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet

We have just added FCoE support to our storage line of SN-5000 series appliances. The Open FCoE project is relatively new, but their code held up well enough through our QA testing that we decided to provide this bleeding edge feature. The default SN-5400 and SN-5800 images just support iSCSI. FCoE, ATA over Ethernet and NFS will be supported as part of an optional feature-set.

FCoE basically encapsulates FC frames over ethernet. It works very similar to iSCSI in that it uses a target / initiator style system. FCoE enables the "cheap" deployment of FC over existing Ethernet rather than having to invest in more expensive and new infrastructure thats typically associated with Fibre Channel.

SN-5484 initial deployments

The SN-5400 series are multi-terabyte iSCSI storage appliances running AppOS 4.0. The SN-5484 is a 2U storage appliance with four 64-bit processor cores, 8GB of memory and 4TB of storage space. The SN-5484 has quad 1000BaseT connections, and one management port. The SN-5484 supports SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) as well as SATA-II. The SN-5484 can be built for under US$3000.

The SN-5484 is an enterprise grade storage solution shipping with Linux 2.6.23.9. The solution features a custom in-house developed storage stack by Spliced Networks. The first SN-5484 will go into production at Spliced Networks corporate head quarters in Athens, Ohio. The SN-5484 at Spliced Networks replaces the first generation storage appliances, the SN-5015.

The SN-5484 and SN-5888 storage appliances are currently being phased in at several customer sites as replacements for aging NetApp F760 and F820 series filers. The SN-5400 and SN-5800 series appliances will be listed on the Open Appliances site when it goes live later this month.

The storage solution stack will be available upon the GA release of AppOS 4.0.

Spliced Networks upgrades to Leopard

Here at Spliced Networks we use Fedora Core Linux workstations based on AMD Athlon64 X2 hardware, and multiple LCDs. However we use Apple Macbook and Macbook Pros for our mobile needs. We have a number of Mac Pro servers for development on the MacOS X platform as well. Today, we've moved the MacOS X systems to Leopard, without any problems.