Web Acceleration devices (sometimes called Application Front-Ends or AFEs) are used to offload core networking and I/O responsibilities from Web servers. By leveraging a combination of technologies, such as TCP offload, caching (for Web objects only), HTTP compression, and server load balancing, they can improve the performance of web-based applications.
Web acceleration devices focus on improving server scalability and increasing Web performance within the data center; Silver Peak addresses application performance across WAN links and within remote and branch offices. This makes the two solutions complementary to one another. In addition, while web acceleration devices accelerate only HTTP traffic, Silver Peak provides performance improvements across all enterprise applications. This enables Silver Peak to address a superset of the application delivery needs handled by AFEs. Lastly, Silver Peak is able to accelerate both static and dynamic content through advanced data reduction and local information delivery. Web acceleration devices, like web caches, often have difficulty addressing the latter because they require pre-defined tags to detect repetitive data.
Given the complementary nature of the two technologies, Web acceleration devices are often deployed in conjunction with Silver Peak appliances. AFEs assist with the specific data center challenges associated with web application delivery, while the Silver Peak solution ensures that all enterprise applications (including Web) are seamlessly delivered across WAN links to remote and branch offices.
