InfoStor : Silver Peak boosts WAN performance, June 2007 Page 1

By Kevin Komiega

June 11, 2007—As the amount of data moving across the WAN continues to grow, vendors keep rolling out new tools for maximizing the performance of applications over distances. WAN acceleration appliance vendor Silver Peak Systems is the latest vendor to enhance its products in an effort to help companies get more bandwidth for their IT buck.

The company has introduced version 2.0 of its Silver Peak management software for its family of NX acceleration appliances and Global Management System (GMS).

The new software includes various performance upgrades to Silver Peak's Network Memory technology, along with a number of tools that simplify the configuration and deployment of the company's WAN acceleration systems.

"Our Network Memory technology is data reduction technology that is very similar to data de-duplication technologies in the storage world," says Jeff Aaron, Silver Peak's director of product marketing.

According to company officials, Network Memory technology can reduce more than 95% of WAN traffic and accelerate application performance by eliminating the transfer of duplicate data across the WAN. Network Memory adds less than 1ms of latency and works on all types of applications, including real-time data replication, interactive SQL transactions, and streaming video.

"We've enhanced our algorithms for better granularity for picking out byte-level changes. That granularity means we'll get better data reduction numbers," says Aaron. "We've also enhanced our I/O subsystem and tweaked our algorithms to get faster reads and writes at high speeds."

Silver Peak's NX Series appliances sit between network resources and the WAN infrastructure and use Network Memory technology to reduce the amount of data traversing the WAN. NX systems also employ a variety of latency and loss mitigation techniques, compression, and quality of service (QoS) to improve application performance across distributed enterprises.

The Global Management System (GMS) is the overarching management platform for deploying, managing, and monitoring a Silver Peak-enabled WAN. The GMS platform gives IT managers visibility into applications, including WAN performance statistics, application analysis, and tools for the configuration and management of NX Series appliances.

The Silver Peak 2.0 software features new pattern recognition capabilities and faster reads and writes to disk at high speeds over the WAN, a centralized policy engine for easier configuration and management of QoS, routing and optimization policies, new traffic management policies, individual application optimization techniques, and auto-configuration capabilities.

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