Virtela Brings Application Acceleration to the Cloud

The Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC) is designed to support a variety of application acceleration appliances from companies such as Riverbed Technology, Blue Coat Systems and others.

Priced at $5 per day per branch office, Virtela CEO Vab Goel says the service is a mechanism via which the industry as a whole can overcome the relatively low adoption of application acceleration technologies. Even though there are more latency-sensitive applications than ever, Goel notes that the expense of acquiring and managing application acceleration technologies has slowed adoption.

The existence of the Virtela service, which leverages contracts that Virtela has established with multiple global carriers, means that for the first time many IT organizations can afford to configure service level agreements around services being delivered to the branch office.

Goel says that while there is a trend toward convergence of server, storage and network services in the cloud, most customers are more comfortable separating those services so as not to be overly dependent on one vendor or a specific carrier.

Virtela, says Goel, also intends to deliver a variety of network services via the cloud as a complement to any number of server and storage services being delivered via the cloud.