Mountain View, CA, October 16, 2006 –Silver Peak Systems (www.silver-peak.com), the leading provider of scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration appliances, today announced a new framework for end-to-end security and data privacy in an accelerated WAN environment. The Silver Peak “Secure Content Architecture™" ses encryption technology to protect data at all times – at rest and across the WAN. With its Secure Content Architecture, Silver Peak makes it easy to configure, enforce, and monitor security policies for its WAN acceleration appliances from a central location, and employs hardware acceleration to ensure that security scales with growing Enterprise WAN acceleration demands. With Silver Peak’s Secure Content Architecture, enterprises have the confidence they need to deploy WAN acceleration as a strategic component of key IT initiatives, including business continuity, server/storage consolidation and branch office consolidation..
“We require close coordination between hundreds of employees, consultants and outside contractors spread across dozens of offices”, said Garv Nayyer, Senior Integration Engineer at SoundTransit, the organization responsible for building and operating the regional transit system in the greater Seattle area. “From a scalability standpoint, we needed a solution that could support both voice and video applications between all of these locations. From a security standpoint, we required disk encryption to ensure compliance with strict government standards. When these requirements were put forth, the Silver Peak solution stood out from the rest.”
Data Plane Protection:
The Secure Content Architecture employs various techniques to ensure that data remains secure, regardless of where it is in the WAN acceleration process. This is achieved via the following:
- Hardware Acceleration: Silver Peak employs hardware to ensure that performance does not suffer at the expense of security. By using dedicated multiple Gigabits per second (Gbps) processors within the Silver Peak NX appliances, line rate performance can be achieved even when encryption is enabled.
- Disk encryption : Silver Peak employs 128 bit AES encryption to protect all data stored on NX appliances. This is the only fail-safe way to ensure the privacy of information in the event that an entire device (or individual hard drive) is stolen, compromised, or changes hands.
- Secure Transmission (IPsec): Silver Peak supports 128 bit IPsec (using AES for encryption) to ensure that data as secure as it is transferred over the WAN.
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Acceleration: Silver Peak accelerates SSL traffic using a variety of techniques, including Quality of Service (QoS) and TCP acceleration. By offering 128 bit encryption for data on the disk and on the wire, with hardware acceleration, additional SSL features will be added via a software upgrade.
“As WAN optimization requirements continue to scale in size and complexity, new features become increasingly important,” said Mark Fabbi, Vice President & Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. “Disk encryption is needed to ensure the protection of distributed data, and is becoming a critical feature in many environments. Other mechanisms both within the branch device and data centre are needed to deal with the increasing amounts of encrypted traffic used by mission critical business applications.”
Control Plane Protection:
Silver Peak’s Secure Content Architecture delivers a variety of features that control the manner in which traffic traverses the WAN. These include:
- Centralized control: Silver Peak’s Global Management System (GMS) enables advanced authentication policies to be centrally configured and enforced. This includes “peer authentication”, whereby only valid Silver Peak appliances are allowed on the network, and connectivity can only be established between trusted Silver Peak devices. These features protect an enterprise from session hijacking or man-in-the-middle (MiM) types of attacks that can compromise WAN acceleration solutions.
- Advanced Application-based policy management: Silver Peak’s NX appliances make intelligent policy decisions in real-time to improve the security and performance of WAN traffic. They can determine which WAN acceleration techniques should be applied to individual flows of traffic to optimize performance, and choose to prioritize traffic based upon pre-established security policies. Silver Peak NX appliances employ stateful deep packet inspection to make intelligent acceleration decisions when handling applications that use ephemeral (i.e. temporary) ports, such as Voice over IP (VoIP), FTP, MAPI, and RPC.
- Secure Access: Access to all Silver Peak devices is tightly controlled using TACACS+ and RADIUS. This ensures complete AAA protection, including user tracking and auditing per-command authorization, and group based authentication privileges. Enterprises can use existing databases to facilitate administration and avoid potential security holes.
“Security and compliance are driving more and more IT initiatives – from server centralization to business continuity planning,” said Rick Tinsley, CEO at Silver Peak. “WAN acceleration should be held to the same high security standards as every other element within the IT infrastructure. From disk encryption to policy control, Silver Peak has all of the elements necessary to satisfy this objective, giving enterprises the confidence they need to deploy WAN acceleration across all data centers and remote offices.”
About Silver Peak Systems, Inc .
Silver Peak facilitates the centralization of servers and storage by improving application performance across a Wide Area Network (WAN). With the company’s award winning NX family of WAN acceleration appliances, enterprises can improve disaster recovery in data centers and reduce “server sprawl” in branch and remote offices. Silver Peak delivers exceptional, transparent performance improvements for all enterprise applications, including data replication, backup, file transfers, email, web, and real-time applications such as Citrix and VoIP. For more information, visit http://www.silver-peak.com/infocenter
NOTE: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, Network Memory and Silver Peak NX Series are trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc.