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Silver Peak Will Expand Portfolio Up and Down in Q1 '06
Silver Peak Systems Inc plans to expand its portfolio of network acceleration appliances at both the high- and low-end early next year to meet the requirements of high-speed corporate networks and small branch offices.
The Mountain View, California-based company has been shipping products for just three months and presently counts three referenceable customers plus, it claims, more than 50 trials with large corporates running distributed networks.
Its technology is designed to enable branch server consolidation for such organizations, but Silver Peak is at pains to characterize it as network acceleration rather than WAN optimization or application acceleration, two areas in which there has been considerably M&A activity this year.
Craig Stouffer, Silver Peak's VP of worldwide marketing, described WAN optimization, whose practitioners include Packeteer, Peribit (now owned by Juniper), Expand, Allot, Radware and Swan Labs (now part of F5), as primarily QoS (packet scheduling etc) and compression. It achieves "a two- or threefold improvement in network performance, but not sufficient to carry a company's consolidation strategy," he said
Meanwhile, application acceleration, where the usual suspects are the likes of Redline (now belonging to Juniper), NetScaler (now Citrix), FineGround (Cisco) and Pivia (F5 via Swan Labs), "gives great performance but is often app-specific, and frequently invasive to the native application they are accelerating."
Silver Peak, therefore, developed its technology to carry out acceleration at the network layer (i.e. Layers 2-4) rather than up at the app layer (L7). It does this by placing devices at both the corporate HQ/data center and at the branch office, analyzing outgoing and incoming byte streams at both locations and stripping out repeated strings of data. These are stored locally at both ends, so that they can be re-inserted at the receiving end, with only the changed data having to actually traverse the WAN.
If this sounds similar to what Peribit/Juniper does with its Sequence Mirroring capability, it is, but there is a significant difference, said Stouffer. "They still apply link characteristics to the transmission, such that if 200 identical emails are sent out from head office to all branches, they have to keep 200 files, one at each branch," he said, "whereas we discard the link-by-link approach, which means we can keep a single instance on the network."
He said the company's technology is equally applicable to file acceleration, which has traditionally been the preserve of wide-area file services (WAFS) players such as Actona (now Cisco), Riverbed, Tacit and DiskSites, where Silver Peak's boasting rights from its ability to handle more than just the CIFS and NFS protocols to which the WAFS vendors usually limit themselves. In other words, rather than investing in WAFS and WAN optimization/app acceleration, buying Silver Peak devices gives customers double whammy, the company argues.
The three devices in Silver Peak's NX Series appliance portfolio are:
- the NX-2500, a device for the branch office, handling 2Mbps of throughput, with 0.25TB of disk storage and a list price in the US of $9,995;
- the NX-3500, a 10Mbps, 0.5TB device costing $17,995 list and targeted at regional HQs and larger branches, and
- the NX-7500, the enterprise core product for the data center, with 155Mbps of throughput and 2TB of storage on board, for a list price of $48,995.
Stouffer said the company is looking at expansion but upward, "because around 20% of US companies already have Gigabit links, so we're looking at something to handle the fan-out to branches," as well as downward, "particularly for the European market, where there are a lot of smaller companies." He said the probable timeframe for extension of the product range would be in the first quarter of 2006.
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