Appliance ups the throughput over WAN links

Silver Peak will today launch the NX-5500, a new high-end appliance to help firms speed up applications over wide area network (WAN) links. The vendor has also announced a new Global Management System (GMS) to give firms more control of these accelerated WAN environments.

Silver Peak said the GMS could provide details of application delivery across distributed enterprises, including WAN performance statistics and application analysis. It also provides tools to configure and manage Silver Peak’s NX series appliances from a single console.

Silver Peak spokesman Jeff Aaron said the NX-5500 supports WAN throughput of 50Mbit/s and supports 2TB of encrypted Network Memory, and could help firms to centralise branch office systems in medium-sized datacentres. “We support both TCP and UDP traffic, unlike other acceleration solutions,” he added.

Silver Peak faces competition from other IT vendors offering tools to reduce latency and up throughput over WAN links by speeding up slow, “chatty” network protocols, cacheing frequently used content and compressing large datasets.

Recently there has been consolidation in this market. Last year, Cisco acquired Fineground Networks; Juniper acquired Peribit and Redline; and Riverbed announced a partnership with HP.

This trend shows no sign of abating – Expand Networks last week announced an agreement to acquire DiskSites, another wide-area file services (Wafs) software company. And application acceleration vendor Packeteer recently announced an agreement to acquire another privately held company, Tacit Networks.