Silver Peak Boosts Fat Pipe WAN Performance

Application acceleration startup Silver Peak Systems is continuing its quest to become a leader in the high-capacity WAN link segment of the market, launching June 5 the second major release of the software running its NX acceleration appliances.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company, which targets server centralization and data center backup applications, claims technology leadership for WAN optimization on links that are 30M bps and faster.

Unlike slower-speed WAN links, such "fat pipes" are unique in that they carry much higher volumes of data, more types of applications and many more concurrent user sessions. They are also usually more complex in their configurations, due to built-in redundancy, high-availability design and use of more complex quality-of-service policies, said Craig Stouffer, vice president of marketing for Silver Peak.

Version 2.0 of the NX operating system and Global Management System software focuses on additional performance enhancements and streamlined deployment.

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"We further optimized performance for large data sets, where you have tens of hundreds of gigabytes of data. Our ability to recognize a [pattern] change is more granular. We can recognize smaller changes to get better optimization," Stouffer said.

Silver Peaks NX appliances implement the companys proprietary Network Memory technology, which stores data at the byte level and employs pattern-matching algorithms to recognize previously requested data. Data is localized so that only changes are transmitted between locations.

To read more about Silver Peaks Network Memory, click here.

To simplify deployments, Silver Peak added a new zero-touch feature that makes it possible to deploy the NX appliances in remote offices without requiring a technician on site.

"You plug in a box, it gets its own address and contacts our global management system, which pushes down [the appliances] entire configuration," Stouffer said.

New users at Miles & Stockbridge, a Baltimore-based law firm with multiple offices, found deployment of the appliances to be a breeze, according to CIO Ken Adams.

"We used the central management module. We opened up all the boxes, gave them IP addresses, sent them to remote offices and deployed the configurations from here. It was very easy," said Adams.

Miles & Stockbridge is using the appliances combined with EMC products to centralize backups for its remote servers. "It cut our backup window from 14 hours to 1 hour," said Adams, who estimated the Silver Peak deployment will pay for itself in 18 months "based on the cost of bandwidth well save."

Although Miles & Stockbridge is using the appliances for data backup—a target application for Silver Peak—the firm is not using the typical "fat pipe" WAN connection. Instead, the company is using the appliances over 1.544M-bps T-1 connections.

To streamline configuration of advanced quality of service or access control list policies, Silver Peak in Version 2.0 of its software also added configuration templates that can be pushed out to appliances in remote locations.

The new software release is available June 5.

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