Choosing among multiple types of networking appliance offerings can be a daunting decision for OEMs and their end-customers. Most of the important decisions go beyond the initial capital expense (CapEx) and eventually come down to how appliances best use operational expenses (OpEx).
For over 20 years, Interface Masters Technologies has been providing off-the-shelf innovative networking and embedded appliances based on MIPS, ARM, PowerPC and X86 CPUs with customization services to OEMs, Fortune 100 and startup companies. In designing these products, Interface Masters has taken a holistic view at current data center operations and then built unique solutions that provide a better total cost of ownership (TCO) versus other choices.
Power Costs Critical to Keep OpEx Down
Energy costs are often among the highest costs incurred by data centers. Networking solutions designed with greater power efficiency help OEMs transition their end-customers to advanced capabilities such as next-generation firewalls, WAN optimization, Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), and 4G/LTE infrastructure applications needed to keep up with higher bandwidth demands, while keeping energy costs in check.
Interface Masters networking appliance offerings can simplify reducing power consumption, complexity and cost. These solutions enable data centers to be architected with simple, low-cost, low-power desktop or rack-mounted configurations which provide a building block for supporting the broad range networking features at 1/10/40/100GbE port speeds.
Designed-in Power Efficiency
Each Interface Masters networking appliance model utilizes “Platinum-grade” power supply models with 90% or higher efficiency as a default. Such power supply models have minimal energy wastage during AC to DC power conversion and, therefore, optimum on-going energy costs. In comparison, alternative models from other vendors commonly use Power Supply models with 60% or less efficiency levels resulting in higher energy costs.
In addition, Interface Masters appliances use “Premium” switching regulators with 85% or higher efficiency rating which enable reduced power consumption under various load conditions, high reliability and wide input voltage which, taken together, enable reduced OpEx and overall lower TCO. In contrast, alternative appliance offerings typically utilize standard switching regulators with 70% or less efficiency.
TCO Reduction Drives Component Selection
At Interface Masters Technologies, component selection is based on a holistic view of a component’s cost of ownership based on its potential use in different appliance offerings. Specifically, component selection decisions for network appliance offerings are driven by insight into the TCO of a part’s adoption and use within appliance models versus simply minimizing procurement cost or selecting suppliers that offer parts at lowest prices. Following is the list of TCO-focused component selection criteria used at Interface Masters Technologies:
- The Bell Curve life cycle stage that a component is in is used as a basis for forecasting the obsolescence date for a part and, therefore, its TCO impact.
- Component power efficiency to facilitate optimum energy costs for appliance models.
- Low footprint or package size for the part to enable the smallest form-factor for the overall appliance.
- High level of integration with minimal external components resulting in power and form factor benefits.
OpEx Advantages Driven by 1U Form Factor
Interface Masters Technologies networking appliances are offered TCO benefits spanning compute capacity, space utilization, ease of deployment, capacity scaling, and in the compact 1U footprint providing power consumption. Interface Masters 1U appliances are ideal for enterprise private cloud data centers as well as hyper-scale environments provide public facing services, among others. New deployments can begin with a single 1U appliance and expand with additional 1U appliances as capacity requirements increase. This allows power and space savings in space-constrained environments.
Interface Masters has demonstrated networking appliance market leadership by continually innovating to deliver solutions with the industry’s highest performance and lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). With a broad portfolio of hardware and software portfolio technology building blocks, innovative design, and packaging expertise, Interface Masters solutions enable its OEM customers to engineer high-volume networking solutions for cloud, enterprise, and data center environments.
Interface Masters Technologies has for over 20 years been providing off-the-shelf innovative network security solutions with customization services to OEMs, Fortune 100 and startup companies. Our headquarters are located in San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley where we are proud to design and manufacture all of our products. Based on MIPS, ARM, PowerPC and x86 processors, Interface Masters appliance models enable OEMs to significantly reduce time-to-market with reliable, pre-tested and pre-integrated networking solutions that can meet the most challenging security requirements.