Expand Networks (News - Alert) has 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."

According to Expand officials, "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 communications between the ships and shore." 

Earlier this month TMC's (News - Alert) Anil Sharma reported that Expand Networks announced two additions to its Accelerator product family: the 3830 and 3930 models.

Officials with Expand said that the additions deliver advanced WAN optimization in the industry's most compact form factor, Sharma said: "The Accelerators outscale competitive offerings to set new standards for price/performance at the branch office."

Steve Foley, a network engineer at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps Oceanography, said "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 and whatnot that the scientists on the ship can get from shore, "the better they can do their science," he said.

However, satellite bandwidth covering the world's oceans is not only limited in terms of data capacity, it is also extremely expensive. And as Foley says, 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, he says, "we found Expand. We found that it 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 (News - Alert) acceleration, SCPS, and auto fragmentation."

And, Foley notes, "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." 

Expand officials say 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 the rest is done remotely.