Here's what the experts say about Silver Peak and the need for scalable WAN acceleration:
“Silver Peak Systems provided the most technologically superior solution. It scored the highest on current offering, and its solution provides a full suite of optimization techniques as well as a performance-oriented solution. Silver Peak specializes in scalability, with individual devices supporting the best single-box throughput, session processing, and overall storage capacity. Moreover, Silver Peak has paid special attention to encryption for both data transmitted among sites as well as data at rest on each device.”
– Rob Whiteley, Forrester Group Senior Analyst, Wave Report on WAN Optimization Appliances, July 2007
Read Forrester's Wave Report on WAN Optimization Appliances Q3 2007 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,” with top marks for “scalability”, “reliability” and “manageability and usability."
Why is Silver Peak not in the leader's quadrant of the MQ?
The Gartner MQ is focused 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. To that end, Silver Peak is primarily targeting data center and large offices, which was outside of the focus of Gartner's most recent MQ analysis.
The MQ is focused on branch office boxes, or "BOBs" in Gartner vernacular. These are multi-function devices that are installed in smaller branch offices to accelerate application performance across the WAN while simultaneously handling other networking functions, such as routing, DNS, DHCP, and print services. The need for these devices is largely being driven by the move to centralize remote office servers for security, compliance, management, and cost reasons.
The MQ does not focus on the data center component of WAN acceleration. For example, it does not address the unique scalability, performance and security requirements that arise when many remote offices are aggregated into a single data center location, nor does it address the impact that WAN acceleration has on data center-to-data center applications, such as storage replication and network backup, SQL transactions, and disaster recovery.
Silver Peak excels at high capacity, high throughput secure WAN Acceleration. The company's NX appliances deliver 3x-7x the capacity of competing solutions, supporting up to 800 Mbps of WAN capacity, 7 TB of local data store, and 256,000 simultaneous flows in a single device. Because the Gartner MQ assesses vendors' abilities to create and deploy multi-function branch office box solutions, Silver Peak's differentiations do not come through in this particular analysis.
Is there a need for WAN acceleration on "fat" pipes?
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.
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 acceleration requirements for high capacity WAN links?
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). This is a well rounded analysis of the WAN acceleration space that addresses the unique scalability, security, and performance requirements associated with data center applications.
“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.”
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."
“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.”
“The most successful companies take a strategic approach to application delivery, choosing products that work across all WAN links and all applications.”
“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
