Silver Peak Re-Defines Scalability with NX-8000 WAN Acceleration Appliance

New Data Center Appliance Breaks down WAN Barriers to Enable Strategic IT Initiatives

Mountain View, CA, October 16, 2006 –Silver Peak Systems (www.silver-peak.com), a leading provider of scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration appliances, today announced the addition of the NX-8000 to the company’s award-winning NX family of products. Over the past year, Silver Peak’s NX Series appliances have set the standard for scalable WAN acceleration. With the introduction of the new NX-8000 appliance, the company again leapfrogs its competitors in scalability, performance, and value. By addressing these critical deployment criteria, Silver Peak enables businesses to use WAN acceleration as a strategic enabler of key IT initiatives, such as disaster recovery and server centralization.

“Silver Peak has done a great job of making large WAN acceleration deployments easier to deploy and manage, and is smartly focusing on the performance and security requirements of large enterprises” said Brian Garrett, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group, “In doing this, the company is helping enterprises transition WAN acceleration from a tactical solution to a strategic enabler of key IT initiatives, such as disaster recovery and server consolidation.”

Redefining Scalability
Silver Peak’s new appliance resets the bar for WAN acceleration. Unique scalability advantages of the Silver Peak solution include:

  • Highest Throughput : The NX-8000 supports all of Silver Peak’s advanced WAN acceleration techniques (see below) at WAN speeds of 500 Mbps, with support for 800Mbps when only optimizing for network latency. The NX-8000 delivers 2 to 10 times the WAN capacity of competitive offerings.
  • Industry Leading Flow Capacity : The NX-8000 supports over 100,000 TCP flows. As a result, more offices can be connected to a single data center appliance, and more simultaneous traffic can flow between large data center links.
  • Secure acceleration: The NX-8000 is built upon Silver Peak’s Secure Content Architecture™. This ensures that data is always secure – at rest and across the WAN, and that advanced policies can be easily configured and enforced with no impact on performance or scalability. (See the accompanying release, “Silver Peak announces first architecture for end-to-end secure WAN acceleration“)
  • Accelerates all application types. Silver Peak’s entire array of WAN acceleration techniques can be applied to all enterprise applications, regardless of transport protocols or latency requirements. Other vendors rely exclusively on QoS as a way of supporting non-TCP and real-time traffic, limiting their overall effectiveness with Citrix, VoIP, video streaming and other applications.

“Under-investing in your branch office network means remote users won't be able to remain productive and high operational requirements will keep IT staff constantly chasing remote users' connectivity issues,” writes Robert Whiteley, Senior Analyst at the Forrester Group in Upgrading Branch Office Networks, Forrester Research, September 2006. “To streamline your architecture… start by getting security and network operations to collaborate and… choose a device with good scalability, reliability, and performance.”

Technology Leader
Like all Silver Peak NX Series appliances, the NX-8000 uses the following technology components to accelerate enterprises applications in a secure and reliable fashion:

  • Network Memory™: The industry’s leading solution for disk based data reduction, which reduces over 95% of WAN traffic and ensures LAN-like application performance by eliminating the transfer of duplicate data across the WAN. Network Memory is the industry’s only disk based data reduction solution that works on interactive and streaming applications.
  • Latency and Loss mitigation: Silver Peak uses protocol acceleration techniques, such as window size adjustments and selective acknowledgements, to maximize performance on high latency links. In addition, adaptive Forward Error Correction (FEC) maximizes performance on links with high packet loss
  • Quality of Service: Silver Peak appliances support several QoS techniques, including advanced queuing/scheduling and application based policies. Enterprises can deploy and prioritize a wide variety of business critical applications, ensuring that each gets the resources it needs
  • Advanced WAN Compression: Cross-flow payload compression ensures that the transmission of data across the WAN is as efficient as possible by eliminating redundant information. Header compression significantly reduces the overhead inherent to flows of small packets, as is the case with Voice over IP.


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.