Mountain View, Calif. – Dec. 6, 2005 –Silver Peak Systems (www.silver-peak.com), a developer of enterprise-class network acceleration appliances, today announced the results of a product test review performed by Miercom, a private network consultancy group specializing in the testing and analysis of networking products. In this review, the Silver Peak NX appliances demonstrated significant performance improvements across a wide breadth of enterprise applications, including file transfers, disaster recovery, real-time media and interactive applications. The Silver Peak NX-3500 showed significant enhancements in data reduction and application response time when compared to the WXC 500, a leading platform from Juniper Networks®. Of special note was the NX appliance’s ability to address the challenges of delivering Voice over IP (VoIP) and Citrix over a Wide Area Network (WAN), two applications that are often not addressed by many application acceleration solutions.
"We were very impressed to see that the Silver Peak NX appliance showed significant performance benefits in all application environments we tested,” said Robert Smithers, CEO of Miercom. “Remote applications traversing a WAN performed as well as if the client and server applications were running on a LAN. Using Silver Peak’s ‘Network Memory’ technology, we directly measured up to 60x performance improvements in some tests by eliminating the transfer of duplicate data across the WAN. We were skeptical that these benefits could be extended to voice and other real-time applications, like Citrix and Voice over IP. But, the test results clearly show that the Silver Peak NX appliance provides significant performance advantages in almost all application environments.”
About the Miercom Round Up
Silver Peak engaged Miercom to independently test the NX appliance’s ability to improve the performance of common enterprise applications. The full suite of applications tested in this round up included: bi-directional throughput tests using Common Internet File System (CIFS over TCP), data replication using VMware® (via FTP), NFS (over UDP), Citrix, and VoIP quality tests. These applications were chosen to represent a broad sampling of real-world business applications, covering a wide array of transport protocols (TCP and UDP), media (voice and data) and performance characteristics (bulk transfer, interactive and real-time). The testing team used real-world products and simulation equipment that is readily available via the internet, enabling the testing scenarios to be easily reproduced elsewhere.
For reference, the Silver Peak NX family was compared to Juniper’s WXC family. The two products in this competitive test round up were chosen because of similarities in the way each handle enterprise applications – at least at a high level. Both leverage forms of compression, Quality of Service (QoS), protocol acceleration and latency mitigation. In addition, both use forms of pattern recognition to perform data reduction and local storage to deliver information locally where possible. The complete Miercom report can be found at www.silver-peak.com/infocenter
Behind the Numbers
The Silver Peak solution provided significant gains across all applications tested by Miercom:
- Common Internet File System (CIFS): Silver Peak provided a 52x peak performance improvement across a wide sampling of file types
- Network File System (NFS): As NFS runs over UDP, Silver Peak was the only product tested to perform data reduction in this environment, providing an 8x performance improvement over baseline tests.
- Disaster Recovery: Silver Peak provided a dramatic 60x performance improvement when transferring VMware system images across congested WAN links.
- Voice: Only Silver Peak was able to demonstrate voice grade quality over a congested WAN link, receiving a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.3. In addition, Silver Peak was able to dramatically reduce jitter on the WAN link, from several hundred msec to 0.6 msec on average.
- Citrix: Silver Peak did not add any significant increase in latency when running Citrix, and provided an impressive 3x reduction in data across the WAN. This led to a noticeable improvement in user experience - the Citrix Presentation Server™ performed as if it were local when running over a Silver Peak appliance.
- Scalability: Some application acceleration appliances are limited by the number of TCP flows that they can support - as little as 200 flows per appliance in some instances. Miercom put both products to the test by creating 2,000 concurrent TCP sessions and then repeating the CIFS tests previously performed. Neither missed a beat.
Silver Peak Technology
Network memory is used by the Silver Peak NX appliances to examine byte streams of data as they are sent between clients and servers. Information passing through an appliance is stored by the device as a local instance. Whenever future requests are made for this same information (or similar information), it is delivered locally from the appliance instead of being re-transmitted across the WAN. This concept is known as “Local Instance Networking”.
Silver Peak offers the premier solution for Local Instance Networking. NX Series appliances leverage a variety of innovative technology components, which include:
- Network memory works at the network layer, enabling it to support all all enterprise applications.
- Network Memory is bidirectional, enabling patterns seen in one direction of a WAN link to be immediately detected in the reverse direction.
- A single local instance of information is stored on each NX Series appliances, regardless of how many WAN links are connected to the appliance. This increases the effective storage capacity of each appliance.
- All information on NX Series appliances is protected using hardware-based 128 bit AES encryption.
- NX Series appliances employ advanced QoS to ensure appropriate traffic classification and enforcement.
- Silver Peak uses advanced crossflow payload and header compression to improve application delivery, even on first passes.
- Protocol acceleration and other techniques help to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss across the WAN.
About Miercom
With hundreds of its product-comparison analyses published over the years in such leading network trade periodicals as Business Communications Review, Network World and VoIP Magazine, Miercom’s reputation as the leading, independent product test center is unquestioned. With over 15 years offering testing services, the company has pioneered the comparative assessment of networking hardware and software, having developed methodologies for testing products from enterprise class VoIP gateways and IP PBX’s to carrier grade switching equipment and gateway products. Miercom’s private test services include competitive product analyses, as well as individual product evaluations. Miercom features comprehensive certification and test programs for VoIP, Security and Reliability: Certified SIP™, CertifiedReliable™ and CertifiedSecure™. Products may also be evaluated under the NetWORKS As Advertised™ program, in which networking-related products must endure a comprehensive, independent assessment of the products’ usability and performance.
Miercom is headquartered in Cranbury, NJ. For more information, visit http://www.miercom.com .
About Silver Peak
Silver Peak enables enterprises to centralize branch office infrastructure and improve application performance across a Wide Area Network. The company pioneered Local Instance Networking, a technology that reduces “server sprawl” and achieves exceptional acceleration for all applications, including bulk TCP applications, file transfer services, real-time applications like Citrix, media applications and VoIP in an application transparent manner.
NOTE: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, Silver Peak Network Memory and Silver Peak NX-Series are trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc.
Certified SIP™, CertifiedReliable™ and CertifiedSecure™ and NetWORKS As Advertised™ are trademarks of Miercom, Inc.
Citrix® and Citrix Presentation Server ™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.
VMware® is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or various jurisdictions.
Juniper Networks® is a registered trademark of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries