Silver Peak Expands WAN Optimization Portfolio

Startup Silver Peak Systems next week plans to expand its WAN optimization portfolio with the launch of a new application acceleration appliance for midsize data centers and an asset management offering for expanding enterprise deployments.

In an effort to fill a gap in its product line, Silver Peak is launching the NX-5500, which supports 50 Mbps of WAN capacity. Until now, the vendor’s application acceleration appliance line skipped from 10 Mbps of WAN capacity with its NX-3500 to 155 Mbps with its NX-7500, said Craig Stouffer, vice president of worldwide marketing for Silver Peak, Mountain View, Calif.

“Within our target customers, about 25 percent have around a 50-Mbps data center, and we didn’t have anything ideally suited for them,” Stouffer said.

Steve DeNato, sales manager of Silver Peak partner Vega Business Technologies, San Diego, said the new NX-3500 should enable the vendor and its partners to tackle a new class of customer.

“DS3s, or 45-Mbps circuits, are a little more common than OC3s [155 Mbps], so I think this is going to open up the market for them,” DeNato said.

In addition to the new acceleration appliance, the vendor also is launching the Silver Peak Global Management System, a new appliance that automates device configuration, monitoring and asset management.

By using wizards, solution providers can quickly push configurations out to new devices, establishing point-to-point, hub-and-spoke or peer-to-peer network setups. It’s a capability Silver Peak channel partners can use to provide value-added network configuration services, Stouffer said.

The hardened appliance can scale to support from 10 to 500 nodes and comes to market as Silver Peak is starting to see deployments of its technology move from departmental to network-wide rollouts, he said.

Mitchell Hryckowian, CTO of Network System Architects, a Stoughton, Mass.-based solution provider, said customers truly see the benefits of WAN optimization when they roll out Silver Peak’s application acceleration technology throughout the organization.

“We find that as people within the organization know that something like this exists, they all want a piece of the action,” Hryckowian said.

Solution providers said they are positioning Silver Peak’s wares as part of broader server consolidation solutions in which they are pulling servers out of branch offices and consolidating them in centralized data centers. The end result for customers is lowered infrastructure and support costs and improved security without sacrificing application performance for branch office users.

Available now, the NX-5500 costs $44,995, while the Global Management System starts at $9,995.