Silver Peak Systems, Inc.

Data Center Class WAN Optimization

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Silver Peak Systems, Inc. Data Center Class WAN Optimization
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Analyst Overview

 
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Here's what the experts say about Silver Peak and the need for data center class WAN optimization:

Silver Peak "has the strongest current offering, with top optimization techniques and monitoring and reporting. Silver Peak was an early adopter of onboard disk encryption (128 bit AES encryption). The vendor offers a robust appliance architecture designed on multi-CPU, multi-core, 64-bit AMD and Intel processor-based systems and based on Silver Peak’s proprietary OS platform (64-bit Linux kernel). Silver Peak also has the second strongest all-around optimization techniques offerings, with protocol techniques such as CIFS acceleration, TCP acceleration, SSL, Brocade FCIP, UDP, MAPI, FTP, and NFS, as well as application classification (using stateful deep packet inspection), traffic shaping, policy enforcement, packet tagging/marking, capacity planning, path policies, optimization (by policy), QoS parameters, pass-through, drop traffic, and dynamic QoS.”

Chris SIlva, Forrester Research Senior Analyst, Wave Report on WAN Optimization Appliances, November 2009

Read Forrester's Wave Report on WAN Optimization Appliances Q4 2009 where Silver Peak is compared to eight other leading WAN optimization vendors. In the end, Silver Peak earned the highest overall score for “current product offering”. 

Download Forrester's Total Economic Impact (TEI) analysis of a leading Software and Search Engine company.  See how Silver Peak delivered an 8 month ROI.

Download Forrester's Technology Adoption Profile (TAP), entitled "Evaluating the Performance of Shared WANs for Disaster Recovery"

Gartner

Why is Silver Peak not in the leader's quadrant of the MQ?

The Gartner MQ places an enormous emphasis on WAN acceleration as it pertains to branch offices and the perceived need for a low cost, multi-function Branch office Box (“BoB”).  Silver Peak's main differentiation lies in high capacity WAN environments (> 30 Mbps) and large enterprise networks.  Gartner recognizes Silver Peak as a leader in these environments, but they view them as "niche" when compared to the overall market.

Is there a need for data center class WAN optimization?

Yes.  Here are some examples:

  • Consolidation of branch office storage into data center locations will increase the amount of storage in the data center, making replication and network backup more challenging.
  • Network Storage in the enterprise continues to grow at a clip of 50% annually.  Performing network backup and replication of this increased data will require higher performance WANs.
  • Latency, loss, and bandwidth capacity severely limit the rate at which data centers can operate.   The impact of latency and packet loss can not be overcome by costly upgrades to higher capacity WAN connections.  This issue become particularly important as more enterprises deploy real-time applications, like virtual desktops, VoIP, and video.
  • For companies implementing hundreds of ‘serverless branch offices’, the WAN connections between these offices may only be 2 Mbps or less, but these typically aggregate into data centers connected by 50Mbps or 100Mbps WAN connections and very high flow counts.  Scalability across the product line is required in order to support these large deployments.

Where does Gartner address the WAN optimization requirements for high capacity WAN links and large enterprise networks?

Gartner Research VP Joe Skorupa discusses the need for data center class WAN optimization products in this webcast, "Beyond Bandwidth: Preparing the WAN for Data Center Initiatives"

Gartner Distinguished Analyst and Vice President, Mark Fabbi shares his thoughts on "Understanding Scalability Issues with WAN Acceleration Products” in this interactive Webinar. (podcast also available). 

These are both well rounded assessments of the WAN optimization space that address the unique scalability, security, and performance requirements associated with data center applications.

View the webinar - "Understanding Scalability Issues with WAN Acceleration"

“Silver Peak’s three-part product strategy of providing scalability, security, and the ability to accelerate any IP-based application is helping the company succeed.”

Lucinda Borovick, Program Director, IDC, Data Center Networks

Cindy Borovick, IDC’s leading data center analyst, has covered Silver Peak’s WAN Acceleration appliances since Silver Peak first launched.  In her recent IDC Vendor highlight on Silver Peak, Cindy adds:

"The scalable and secure product architecture along with its application independence (performing optimizations at the IP layer instead of at the TCP and application layer) will help Silver Peak expand into large enterprises in markets such as financial services, legal, and software development organizations. The data reduction offered along with optimization across the WAN is important in applications where large amounts of data, such as in video and database applications, are transferred between the datacenter and remote users."

Download IDC’s Vendor Profile on Silver Peak
Download IDC's Profile of Silver Peak Customer AT&T

“With its NX Series and concept of Network Memory, Silver Peak is demonstrating that there’s more than one way to tackle WAN traffic optimization. The company maintains that for large environments in particular, it has the only approach that is able to effectively and efficiently scale, while its support for multiple applications off the bat is another strong claimed differentiator.  Silver Peak has plenty of financial support and ... we’ll be looking for it to net some large accounts quickly."

– Steve Steinke, Senior Analyst, the451, "The Need for Speed" report

“Silver Peak has done a great job of making large WAN acceleration deployments easier to deploy and manage, and is smartly focusing on the performance and security requirements of large enterprises.  In doing this, the company is helping enterprises transition WAN acceleration from a tactical solution to a strategic enabler of key IT initiatives, such as disaster recovery and server consolidation.”

Brian Garret, Senior Analyst at ESG

“The most successful companies take a strategic approach to application delivery, choosing products that work across all WAN links and all applications.”

Arun Taneja, Founder, Taneja Group

“The NX family of appliances not only scale well and provide terrific performance increases but optimize UDP applications.”


“The Silver Peak solution performs like a veteran and doesn't leave out any must-have features.”

Keith Schultz, president NetData consulting (and Infoworld reviewer)

Read the Infoworld product review

Ashton Metzler and Associates

 

“By overcoming scalability limitations, Silver Peak can now interface with CIOs on a strategic level, helping to drive the re-architecture and consolidation of branch office infrastructure.”

Jim Metzler, President Ashton Metzler and Associates

Read Ashton Metzler's buyer's guide

Read Metzler's tech brief on "The Data Replication Bottleneck"
2010 Handbook for Application Delivery

Miercom

“Silver Peak showed significant performance improvements by eliminating duplicate data on the WAN. The results speak for themselves”

Robert Smithers, CEO of Miercom

Read Miercom's test report

 

Disaster Recovery QoS, Quality of Service
     
     
 
 
 
     
corner Network Acceleration, Network Optimization, Network CompressionLocal Instance Networking (LIN)
Network Memory
 
Web Caching
Wide Area File Services - WAFS
VoIP Quality
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