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VOYT's R.S. in "Speed Up Your Remote Connections"
September 25, 2007, By Drew Robb ( Drew Robb is a Los Angeles-based freelancer specializing in technology and engineering. Originally from Scotland, he graduated with a degree in geology from Glasgow's Strathclyde University. In recent years he has authored hundreds of articles as well as the book, Server Disk Management by CRC Press. )

Top-down from R.B.'s VOYT board, provided link to this article:
http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/news/article.php/3701481


Article starts off:
..."Have you ever been out in the field and tried to connect to the organization’s file server over the Internet? Or tried to access the database from hundreds of miles away? Or perhaps open and run an important business application remotely?"...

At the bottom of the article is: RocketStream Blasts Off for SMBs

..."But Riverbed isn’t the only game in town for small business WAN Acceleration. RocketStream Inc., for instance, believes that more must be done to make WAN acceleration accessible to a large number of companies.

“WAN appliances are usually price-prohibitive for companies with fewer than 500 employees at a single location,” said Steffen Koehler, chief marketing officer at RocketStream. “You really need a large concentration of employees in one physical location to get enough scale to justify a WAN appliance.”

That, he said, is the reason why WAN appliances are far more common in large enterprises than in the SMB market. And the few small businesses that have WAN appliances usually need them because they absolutely need to use distributed application software. This is typically restricted to highly technical firms.

When most small companies are talking about WANs, then, they are just talking about the public Internet or VPNs running over the Internet. After all, only large enterprises generally need and can afford to set up and run their own private WANs. Whether SMBs would benefit from acceleration of the public Wide Area Network, therefore, is really down to whether they move large amounts of data over large distances.

“If you only send e-mail or all of your business is in the same city, you probably don’t need acceleration,” said Koehler. “But if you send large files (video, financial data, scientific data, disaster backup information, etc.) over long distances (outside your metropolitan area), then using plain old TCP is probably slowing you down.”

The company’s products — RocketStream Uplink, Station and Server — are all priced based on data rate. For the low end of the market, all three of these products apply at slower speeds. The entry-level product, for instance, is geared to T1 (1.5 Mbps), DSL, and cable modem connections, which are the connections more commonly used by small businesses, SOHO and remote workers. RocketStream Uplink is the client, RocketStream Server is for a server, and RocketStream Station is a combination of a client and a server in one package.

RocketStream Station and Uplink are designed for people with no IT training. According to Koehler, the software can be installed within five minutes and requires no maintenance. An IT administrator, on the other hand, usually installs RocketStream Server, though it does not require much ongoing support.

“Our smallest customer right now is an company in Michigan that makes industrial flow control products,” said Koehler. “They have remote design centers in Bulgaria and Germany with whom they exchange software, factory information and sales information on a regular basis.”

He cautions small businesses to avoid WAN appliances in most cases, as they can be overly expensive as well as complex to implement."...