ROSELAND, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Expand Networks www.expand.com, the leader in optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, today announced that its advanced WAN Optimization technology is supporting satellite communication services for one of the world’s most important centers for global science research, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego. Deployed across one of the largest U.S. academic fleets, Expand’s Accelerators are improving the performance of critical applications and communications over low bandwidth – high latency satellite links, enabling fast, reliable and cost-effective communications between the ships and shore.

Steve Foley is a network engineer at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps Oceanography: “Our research vessels need to squeeze every bit of bandwidth out of those fixed satellite links. The more data we can send home, the better. The more satellite images, phone calls, support, etc. that the scientists on the ship can get from shore, the better they can do their science.”

However, satellite bandwidth covering the world’s oceans is not only limited in terms of data capacity, it is also extremely expensive. Foley explains, “Satellite is notoriously problematic for bandwidth acceleration, and we’d resigned ourselves to sufficing with what we had. It was a case of ‘if only network accelerators weren’t so ineffective over satellite links.’ Then we found Expand.”

Foley evaluated Expand Accelerators as well as Riverbed technology in the hope of overcoming these performance challenges. “We found that Expand was the only one that had the features geared towards making our low-bandwidth satellites useful. Our issues aren’t about running CIFS across our high delay links, but we really care about things like UDP acceleration, SCPS, and auto fragmentation. We were also impressed when Expand didn’t look at us funny when we said we wanted to put their gear on ships! To them it was the norm.”

Initial roll-out was accomplished smoothly on the two initial platforms, Scripps’ research vessel Roger Revelle and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s vessel, Atlantis. Since then, additional devices have proved themselves to be truly ‘plug and play.’ “Non-IT folks have been receiving accelerators straight from Expand, popping them in the ship’s equipment racks, setting IP addresses, then walking away while we do the rest remotely. The amount of management control we have from shore is very impressive.”

Combining integrated Space Communication Protocol Standard (SCPS) with compression, byte-level caching and layer 7 QoS, Expand’s technology is extending ‘virtual capacity’ to staff working onboard and onshore, enabling Scripps to pass substantially more data across its fixed bandwidth satellite links.

“Bandwidth was costly,” stated Foley. “Now, with the savings in bandwidth our Expand Accelerators are paying for themselves within nine to 18 months. We estimate we are saving over $600 per month for each of our large global ships.”

Howard Teicher, VP Public Sector & Satellite Markets, Expand Networks concludes, “At Expand, we’ve been optimizing a broad range of afloat environments across the world’s largest shipping, naval and maritime organizations since 2001. This is another great example of how Expand can bolster performance of satellite links, even in the most extreme and remote environments. The Accelerators tight integration and ease of deployment enable operations like Scripps to offer increased levels of quality of service by way of higher bandwidth throughput, reduced latency, and seamless delivery of critical applications, while reducing bandwidth costs.”