Virtual WAN Optimiser Could Boost Data Centres

Silver Peak Systems has launched what it said was the first virtualised WAN optimisation appliance suitable for high-end data centre use. It claimed that the new VRX-8 software delivers over 20 times more throughput than any other virtualised WAN optimisation appliance on the market.

The company also released higher-performing software for its existing physical and virtual WAN appliances, added customisable management dashboards, and announced its expansion into the European market. It has set up German and French offices, recruited European distributors, and put its UK office under the control of its new EMEA vice-president, Mike Betz.

“Customers all have virtualised networks and don’t want to ship hardware around, but they still want Gigabit capabilities,” said Jeff Aaron, Silver Peak’s marketing vice-president. He added: “The rest of the virtual WAN appliance industry is still stuck at E3 [34Mbps] though, which is only suitable for branch office links.”

Maximising bandwidth

Like the company’s other WAN appliances, the $69,995 (£44,290) VRX-8 includes a range of optimisation features, for example to overcome latency, fix packet transmission errors, maximise bandwidth, and allocate WAN capacity. It uses multiprocessing to achieve its performance and requires a minimum of eight processor cores. Aaron said that Silver Peak’s technology also intelligently assesses the WAN connection and the data passing through it, and only enables the optimisation features that will deliver improvements.

With this latest software release, its virtual appliances can run on Microsoft’s HyperV, as well as on VMware. The company will port its software to the Citrix XenServer hypervisor next, with a version for Linux’s KVM likely to follow.

Aaron said that while rivals such as Cisco, Expand Networks and Riverbed have targeted branch offices, offering to optimise their links back to HQ, Silver Peak has focused on the data centre and especially on the fat pipes that link primary and secondary centres for data replication, backup and so on.

It also has smaller WAN appliances though, and Mike Betz said that it has managed to parlay data centre success into enterprise-wide wins in companies such as Avaya, Visa and VMware. He said that as well as Europe, he sees significant opportunities in Africa, squeezing more performance out of limited local network infrastructures.