Silver Peak Intros Traffic Control Tool for Hybrid WANs

Silver Peak wants to make it easier for businesses to ensure the performance of their applications on hybrid wide-area networks.

The company is rolling out its Dynamic Path Control technology, which leverages real-time network intelligence to find the fastest, most reliable and most available path for an application, according to company officials.

The technology comes at a time when businesses increasingly are linking their branch offices to hybrid WANs, which comprise two or more networks, such as the Internet and a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbone. This is done for several reasons, ranging from saving money to improving availability to improving the performance of cloud environments.

“Regardless, maximizing the investment of a hybrid WAN remains a challenge for many IT organizations,” David Greenfield, product marketing manager at Silver Peak, said in a post on the company’s blog. “Secondary connections often lie dormant, under-utilized, or the application experience is sacrificed as traffic is indiscriminately directed down one connection or another without considering the impact on application performance.”

The vendor’s Dynamic Path Control—a new feature in Silver Peak’s Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA)—is designed to address the issue by using the real-time network intelligence to move applications onto the fastest, least-congested or most reliable network, which officials said will improve the performance of the application and ensure the more reliable delivery of services across the network.

“By working in real time, Dynamic Path Control lets Silver Peak prevent application problems,” Greenfield wrote. “Significant packet loss rates and latency fluctuations often precede line failure. Silver Peak can detect those changes and switch application traffic to an alternative path before a user experiences any change at the application. Voice calls become more consistent and access to line-of-business systems becomes more predictable all because Silver Peak ensures the application takes the optimum path between locations. It’s the difference between a GPS and a GPS with real-time traffic updates. Which would you want?”