From Silver Peak’s point of view, it is evident that the requirements for WAN optimisation deployments are changing. The WAN solutions provider founder and CTO, David Hughes, believes that the growing adoption of virtualisation, dynamic workloads, and shrinking physical estate in data centres, are contributing to a shift from custom hardware-based WAN optimsers to software equivalents.
The cost and complication of vendor-imposed hardware refresh cycle, would also see increased demand for software-based virtual WAN optimisation. Simplification is also the order of the day, as virtual WAN optimisers enable a greater variety of application owners to enable optimisation on a workload-by-workload basis.
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| David Hughes |
Performance and scalability continue to be priorities, and replication over long distances is also starting to be an emerging trend, in light of recent natural disasters and increased disaster recovery needs.
Hughes said, “With Silver Peak’s Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) software, Silver Peak is delivering the highest-performing, most flexible, and cost-effective options for deploying WAN optimisation anywhere in an enterprise, on any platform, and on any virtual infrastructure or the cloud.”
According to the CTO, all Silver Peak products are architected around the Silver Peak VXOA software. “So whether you deploy our physical machines, or our software running on a standard server, router blade, or storage array, you get the same product functionality. Silver Peak is the only WAN optimisation vendor to provide gigabit and multi-gigabit support across all common hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM. Silver Peak also optimises all IP traffic, regardless of version or transport protocol.
This is important for FSI, telco and public sector IT organisations that run custom or proprietary applications of non-TCP protocols,” Hughes said.
Industry alliances, go-to-market
Silver Peak continues to be the go-to WAN optimisation provider in the storage world. Silver Peak has key partnerships with Dell, EMC, HDS, NetApp, HP (3PAR), and others. Many of these vendors have also standardised on Silver Peak for their own internal WAN optimisation needs.
Hughes described, “Silver Peak is a Dell Global Preferred Partner for WAN optimisation, and customers can purchase Silver Peak through Dell in over 30 countries throughout North America, EMEA, and APAC. Silver Peak WAN optimisation solutions have also been available through the EMC Select program since 2008, which enables customers to purchase a complete solution for fast and reliable data access and protection directly from EMC.”
Since joining the EMC Select program, Silver Peak has been qualified and deployed on a wide range of EMC replication products, including Isilon SyncIQ, SRDF/A, RecoverPoint, Atmos, VPLEX Geo, and Celerra.
With these qualifications, the two companies have expanded their mutual list of interoperable products to cover a wide range of enterprise deployment scenarios. Finally, through a Silver Peak Velocity program, storage managers can now achieve 20x faster replication in 20 minutes or less.
Silver Peak offers perpetual and subscription-based pricing, with pay-as-you-go and pay-as-you-grow options and investment protection, and AutoOptimization capabilities built into the software ensure a fast time to optimisation. For example, storage managers can accelerate their replication workloads by 20x in just 20 minutes.
