Silver Peak Systems, Inc.

The Need for WAN Acceleration

WAN acceleration reduces the amount of traffic sent across the Wide Area Network (WAN) and delivers information locally whenever possible.  This improves the costs associated with application delivery – from staffing, infrastructure and facility costs to expenditures in application software and WAN bandwidth.  In addition, WAN acceleration protects investments in business critical applications by ensuring that they meet end user performance objectives, and it minimizes risk of exposure by improving the performance and reliability of data backup, replication and recovery.  As a result, WAN acceleration provides an extremely rapid return on investment, plus the intangible benefit of increased end user productivity and unsurpassed IT satisfaction.

There are several areas where enterprises can benefit from WAN acceleration, which include:

• Improve the Performance and Reliability of Disaster Recovery - Disaster recovery can be particularly difficult to achieve across a Wide Area Network (WAN).  For one, backup, replication and recovery involve the transfer of entire volumes of data, which require a significant amount of WAN bandwidth.  In addition, many business continuity tasks react poorly when in the presence of high latency, resulting in application timeouts and subsequent database synchronization problems.

WAN acceleration overcomes these challenges by reducing the amount of data sent across the WAN during the backup, replication, and restore processes, and delivering information locally whenever possible to accelerate application response time.  In addition, TCP acceleration and Quality of Service (QoS) help overcome other bandwidth and latency challenges that often plague disaster recovery initiatives.

• Improve Application Performance across the WAN - There are inherent limitations associated with Wide Area Networks that make it difficult to deliver business critical applications to remote and branch offices.  Bandwidth is limited and costly to provide, latency occurs when communication is taking place over long geographic distances, and network congestion can lead to packet loss.  The back-off mechanisms incorporated within TCP, coupled with the “chatty” behavior of common application protocols, such as CIFS, further exacerbate the situation. The result is poor application response time in many enterprise WAN environments.  By overcoming these limitations, WAN acceleration can improve employee productivity and protect investments in business critical applications while save on ongoing support costs and WAN bandwidth expenditures.

• Facilitate Data Center Consolidation - According to recent Computerworld and Ziff Davis surveys, over 80% of enterprises are either exploring branch office infrastructure consolidation projects, or have already taken steps towards this goal.  By facilitating the centralization of servers and storage, WAN acceleration can save a significant amount of money in infrastructure costs, software investments, WAN bandwidth, and day-to-day operational expenditures. 

The Market

In a recent Ziff Davis survey, 94% of enterprises said that they are experiencing one or more major challenges in deploying applications across the WAN. Furthermore, when it comes to business continuity, 83% of enterprises have a goal of completing backup/replication in less than 5 hours, yet only 40% are actually achieving this goal.  These problems are only getting worse due to an enormous increase in the volume of data that is being protected.  See Info Center & Educational Resources. The application delivery market is expanding rapidly to address these and other needs of distributed enterprises. According to Taneja Group, this market is expected to grow at a 50% compound annual growth rate through the next three years, exceeding several billion dollars by 2010..

The Technology

Silver Peak offers a premier platform for WAN acceleration.  This is achieved leveraging the following innovative technology components:

•  Network Memory™ - Silver Peak's patent-pending solution for disk based WAN deduplication.  Network Memory inspects all traffic that is sent between clients and servers, storing information as a local instance in Silver Peak appliances.  Repetitive information is delivered locally rather than sent across the WAN, improving application performance and WAN utilization.  Cross-flow payload and header compression provide additional gains on first-time data transfers and non-repetitive traffic.

Network Memory™ reduces the amount of information that is traversing a WAN by several orders of magnitude and enables information to be delivered with LAN-like performance, making it an extremely effective tool when delivering an application across a distributed enterprise. 

• Network Integrity: Silver Peak employs a variety of real-time techniques to address packet delivery issues common to shared WAN technologies, such as MPLS and IP VPN. These include adaptive Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Packet Order Correction (POC) to overcome dropped and out-of-order packets, and advanced Quality of Service (QoS) techniques to prioritize traffic and guarantee network resources.

• Network Acceleration:  Silver Peak mitigates the impacts of latency across the WAN by using various TCP acceleration techniques, like adjustable window sizing and selective acknowledgements, as well as CIFS acceleration techniques, such as read-aheads and write-behinds.   These tools help to overcome inherent chattiness that can otherwise hamper application performance across a WAN

• Secure Content Architecture™ : Silver Peak keeps enterprise data secure with its Secure Content Architecture.  All NX appliances are equipped with wirespeed AES encryption to protect local data stores.  Optional IPsec keeps content safe when it traverses the WAN.  Intelligent security policies can be established for granular control of WAN traffic.

The Company

Founded in 2004, Silver Peak is a privately held company that improves backup, replication and recovery between data centers and facilitates branch office server and storage centralization by improving application performance across the Wide Area Network (WAN).  The company’s award winning NX appliances deliver exceptional performance improvements with unprecedented security and scalability across all enterprise applications, including data replication, backup, file transfers, email, web and real-time applications such as Citrix and VoIP. 

Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Silver Peak is funded by Artis Capital Management, Benchmark Capital, Duff Ackerman and Goodrich, Greylock Partners, and JW Seligman.