As a long time player in the market, Silver Peak is making it a lot easier, both financially and politically, for storage and virtual administrators to accelerate data replication performance.
In the past, storage administrators used to have to get on bended knee to have their networking counterparts implement WAN acceleration hardware solutions. By delivering their technology through software as a virtual appliance, however, Silver Peak is empowering storage and virtual server administrators to take matters into their own hands; without engaging wary network administrators or treading on their hallowed turf.
This is no small consideration given the very real need to deploy affordable solutions on the quick without having to incur office politics, red tape or the logistical issues associated with installing hardware; particularly when remote office locations are involved.
In fact, since Silver Peak makes their software available on a trial basis, end users with congested network links really have nothing to lose by giving their technology a shot. The software installs quickly into a VM and typically within a matter of hours, infrastructure managers will be able to see point blank whether there is any material benefit – either data movement will dramatically improve or it won’t. They also provide a trailing 10 day report to show empirical evidence of network performance improvement – which is always important for helping to justify acquisitions to management.
Generally speaking, Silver Peak claims their solution is a good fit for an environment that is incurring 20ms or more of network latency. Their technology is designed to make constrained network links look larger by applying data deduplication as well as fixing and properly arranging network packets. To further customize things for storage oriented technologists, Silver Peak’s performance dashboard displays metrics in GB’s/minute and TB’s/hour rather than in MB/s – helping storage planners to quickly assess if they are hitting business application service level agreements.
The Amazon Angle
Silver Peak can even accelerate virtualized private cloud (VPC) applications running in Amazon’s cloud. This is a much needed capability as one of the prime issues affecting cloud based applications is the network latency that is often encountered when moving data back and forth over the internet. Additionally, by deduplicating data to eliminate repetitive data patterns, Silver Peak claims they can actually help reduce Amazon Web Services (AWS) traffic charges that are incurred when data is moved in and out of Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. In some cases, this can actually reduce cloud costs by up to 80% while accelerating data transfers up to 20 times.
Storage Swiss Take
Given the rapid pace of business, a software oriented approach that leverages existing virtualized infrastructure, to accelerate network performance, makes a lot of sense. Most businesses encounter some measure of network bandwidth limitations within their private and/or public cloud infrastructure environments. It is especially true for the remote office locations they support. Silver Peak’s no-risk software approach is another tool in the virtual tool kit arsenal to ensure the protection of mission critical business data.
Silver Peak is a client of Storage Switzerland
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As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.
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