Enterprises get WAN link boost

Enterprises with high-capacity wide area network (WAN) links could benefit from Silver Peak Systems’ upgrade to its platform for WAN acceleration devices.

Silver Peak's vice president for worldwide marketing, Craig Stouffer, said that the company is "focusing on so-called 'fat pipe' WAN acceleration for companies with larger networks and connections of 30Mbit/s or faster" with the upgrade.

He said that Silver Peak sought to let its customers move a lot of data fast, "like when they're replicating data or performing a large backup over the network". He added that this is unlike other WAN acceleration vendors, where the primary focus is branch office WAN acceleration for productivity applications like Microsoft Office or SharePoint.

Silver Peak quotes 30-50 percent faster throughput than its previous software release. "For example, if a customer was replicating a dataset that took six hours, we'd look to improve that to around four hours," said Stouffer. In particular, Silver Peak says it can run replication-type applications, such as Network Appliance SnapMirror and SnapVault, or EMC SRDF/A (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility/Asynchronous) around 50 percent better.

Silver Peak has also improved management of their WAN acceleration appliances, which Stouffer said would benefit firms with a large number of different locations. A “Zero Touch Configuration” function has been added, which will allow firms to ship the box to any location and use staff with little IT expertise for initial setup. "All they need to do is open the box, attach the cables and put it into a rack – what we call a 'knuckledragger' in the US," said Stouffer, adding that even a “marketing guy” could plug in the network cables and press the “On” button.

A centralised policy manager has also been added in release 2.0, giving firms the option of setting up a standard template for how quality of service will be defined for different applications, and then deploying this to all their appliances with a single click. "Firms can make a template that, say, gives the top class of service to VoIP, and also allows users to prioritise a certain amount of bandwidth to certain applications,” explained Stouffer. “For instance I could always have a minimum of 1Mbit/s on any link at any location for VoIP."

Version 2.0 is currently shipping with all new Silver Peak NX appliances and Global Management Systems (GMS) appliances.