The Silver Peak solution uses a variety of acceleration techniques to overcome the effects of WAN latency and packet loss. These include:
TCP Acceleration
Silver Peak employs a variety of TCP acceleration techniques, including the dynamic adjustment of window and transaction
sizes and selective ACK to compensate for poor performance on high latency links.
CIFS Acceleration
Silver Peak supports CIFS acceleration, including read-aheads and write-behinds to pipeline CIFS requests and the respective acknowledgements. This dramatically minimizes roundtrip delays when using CIFS over a WAN.
Adaptive Forward Error Correction (FEC)
Forward Error Correction (FEC) is a technology that is well known for its ability to correct bit errors at the physical-layer. However, this technology can also be adapted to operate on packets at the network-layer to improve application performance across WANs that have high loss characteristics. Silver Peak uses packet-level FEC to reconstitute lost packets at the far end of a WAN link, avoiding delays that come with multiple-round-trip retransmissions. This enables WANs to easily recover from packet loss due to a variety of network layer conditions, such as queue overflows and constrained bandwidth links. The Silver Peak solution dynamically adjusts the FEC overhead in response to changing link conditions for maximum effectiveness in environments with high packet loss.
With packet level FEC, enterprises commonly see significant improvements in application performance – up to a ten-fold performance increase in some environments. For more information on FEC, click here
Real-time Packet Order Correction (POC)
Silver Peak NX appliances re-sequence packets on the far end of a WAN link “on the fly” to avoid re-transmissions that occur when packets arrive out of order. By performing the functionality in a dedicated WAN optimization device (as opposed to an end station or router), enterprises have the scalability needed to handle high volume, high throughput data streams with minimal added latency. POC is performed in real-time and across all IP flows (regardless of transport protocol).
