Mr. Williams: Tacit's products allow companies to share files with anyone in the world as easily as they do today over shorter distances using local area networks. Users experience LAN-speed access to that globally shared data, even though it may be stored remotely in a data center accessed by a public or private Internet connection. Users can collaborate with other team members located anywhere else in the world, reading and writing that shared data simultaneously and coherently in near real-time, again, just like they can do in today's LANs. We do this by deploying at each site a new kind of storage caching appliance that cache file-sharing operations much the same way that Web- caching appliances cache Web pages. The main difference is our products improve the performance of file sharing networks, whereas Web-caching appliances improve the performance of content delivery networks. To do that, the data on our devices must be live, writable and sharable with other Tacit caching devices located anywhere else in the world. In a sense, these devices transparently link a company's local area networks that previously were only connected by a slow, high-latency, unreliable wide area network connection, into one global, transparent network that looks, feels and performs like a local area network, except of course it has global reach and scope. The WAN connections become transparent and, as far as the user is concerned, they disappear. That's the genesis of the company's name ' thanks to our products, the WANs become a 'tacit network.'
TWST: What's the benefit?
Mr. Williams: The benefits are identical to the benefits that
spurred the adoption of local area networks twenty years ago, but
now, with our products, those benefits can finally be realized on
a global scale. LANs allow you to consolidate all of the storage
for your workgroup by moving your workgroup files onto one
server, where they can be centrally backed up, administered,
provisioned, monitored, etc. And since once those files have been
moved to a common file server, they can be accessed by anyone in
the workgroup, they can also be shared with other members of your
workgroup. Many people can collaborate on the same data, reading
and writing that data coherently and in near real-time. With
Tacit's products, you can do the same thing, but consolidation
and sharing are no longer limited to the LAN. You can be in New
York and you can have a network drive pop up in your network
neighborhood and that drive can actually be physically resident
in California, Tokyo or France, but it looks, feels and performs
like its located on a file server just down the hallway from you.
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