Silver Peak Systems, fast becoming a global player in the burgeoning data center-class wide area network (WAN) optimization world, Nov. 16 announced a new, souped-up version of its VRX-8 virtual appliance for data centers.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, which went into the financial black in 2009, is enjoying 70 percent year-over-year growth. In 2010, it doubled its U.S. sales force and has — or will shortly — open new sales and support offices in Brazil, Japan, Germany, France, China, Australia, and the U.K.
Silver Peak, which sells its wares to a large number of Tier 1-type data center systems vendors, also isn’t bashful about claiming its new VRX-8 v4.0 brings “more than 20 times more throughput [up to 1Gb/per second end-to-end] than any other WAN optimization virtual appliance now available,” Silver Peak Senior Vice President for Worldwide Marketing Larry Cormier told eWEEK.
Riverbed, for one, may beg to differ.
“Riverbed is more about branch offices — we’re more about data centers,” Cormier told eWEEK. “Many of our customers are global corporations, so that’s where we’re growing along with them.”
Cormier said that the VRX-8 v4.0 really is the “industry’s first data center class virtual WAN optimization appliance. There’s nothing else out there that approaches the performance levels it has.”
Long list of partners, customers
Silver Peak has a large number of partners and customers, including Google, eBay, Yahoo, Visa International, Facebook, Expedia, and Intel; the list is long and impressive.
“The reason that the EMCs, HDSes, and NetApps of the world are coming to us is because the playing field for business continuity and disaster recovery has changed,” Cormier said.
“For example, in the past, if I bought EMC storage and I wanted DR with it, they would sell me one of their replication solutions. And they’d say, ‘Oh, by the way, you’ll need a dedicated network link, X amount of bandwidth, and you can’t go more than X number of miles.’
“Customers were pushing back, saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a perfectly good MPLS WAN or Internet VPN WAN, and I want to run my replication traffic over that shared WAN.’ And now, there’s a lot more data traffic required to go over a lot longer distances. That’s where WAN optimization becomes absolutely critical for those kinds of applications,” Cormier said.
Key features in the new version, according to Cormier, are increased network acceleration [bandwidth utilization] and workload capacity, improved network packet protection, better network visibility through customizable application dashboards, and support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server branch office virtualization.
Cormier said the Silver Peak VRX-8 virtual appliance for data center replication will be available in December 2010. List price is $69,995.
Silver Peak version 4.0 embedded software and Global Management System will ship with all new Silver Peak NX, VX, and VRX appliances and GMS platforms in December, he said.