The Silver Peak solution improves WAN quality by overcoming the adverse effects of dropped and out-of-order packets (i.e. packet loss). These quality issues are increasingly problematic as enterprises move to MPLS, IP VPNs and other shared WAN technologies.
With Silver Peak's Network Integrity features, enterprises get all the benefits of MPLS and IP VPNs (i.e. cost effective WAN bandwidth) without sacrificing performance.
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).
SIlver Peak's Unique Advantages
Silver Peak is the only vendor to address Network Integrity issues in real-time with its FEC and POC technologies. Other WAN optimization technologies rely on aggressive TCP retransmission methods to address packet loss, which do not work with time-sensitive applications like voice and video because they add additional latency. Furthermore, these methods only work on TCP traffic, rendering them useless for applications that leverage UDP and other protocols. Lastly, aggressive retransmissions are often quite “unfriendly” to other applications trying to use the WAN at the same time as it consumes all available WAN resources.
Silver Peak provides a wide array of management tools that make it easy to setup its Network Integrity features and monitor the ongoing effect that they have on WAN performance. This includes a variety of advanced templates for QoS policy configuration and management, as well as detailed reporting tools to monitor dropped and out-of-order packets across the WAN.
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