Technical Architects Blog
Reptor by Replify
By Nigel Creighton
I recently came across Belfast based network acceleration company Replify while working with one of our customers using the Replify Reptor product. It's a WAN acceleration tool, but I prefer to think of it as an application acceleration tool. Like other tools in this space, it provides WAN acceleration and caching to allow applications to operate at near LAN speed over a low bandwidth or high latency link. Unlike other solutions, it doesn't require installation of hardware devices at each end of the network link and doesn't come with a high price tag.
I think they have a unique approach in that they provide a virtual appliance which you install on the same LAN as the server hosting the service you want to accelerate. (You download the appliance, load it on your virtual infrastructure, configure some network addresses including the service you want to accelerate and its ready to go). No downtime on the network, no changes to routing tables, no risk to manage in case it impacts production applications. To start using the acceleration you then deploy the reptor client software to the first a PC or laptop. So when this client starts to use the application that you have selected for acceleration their traffic is accelerated between their client and the virtual appliance. Any other application they use is not affected, and the network traffic for all the other clients of the application is unaffected. So it's a very low risk test / deployment.
Let's assume the client you pick is using a notebook in the office, and you are accelerating their file server and SharePoint. Next day they are travelling and use a 3G card to connect back into the office over the VPN and work on the same files and documents that they were using the previous day. Now Reptor comes into its own and accelerates the traffic for them, so that making a small change to the large document they have on SharePoint, or getting a file off the server becomes do-able over this high latency link. The next day they drop into a satellite office which is on your WAN but only has a 256Kb link. Again Reptor will continue to accelerate their traffic over this low bandwidth link, so they don't hog it all and cause problems for the others in the office.
This is what I think is unique about this product, conceptually it operates at the application layer, it doesn't care which physical link you are using. So you don't need a solution specifically for each physical network link, and a special version for your VPN. So does it work. Yes. The client I worked with found significant benefits for an internal HTTP application and file access and decided to buy. If you need a solution to accelerate all your enterprise network traffic over a particular link, then this may not be the right solution. However if you have staff that travel, or multiple offices with low bandwidth and / or high latency connections and want to improve the performance of your most commonly used applications then this is definitely worth looking at.