Silver Peak further reduces WAN traffic

08.12.2010
recently announced the latest version of its that includes a high-speed virtual appliance for data centers and enables a dramatic reduction in the amount of traffic that has to cross WAN links by removing repetitive bytes.

Silver Peak 4.0 software includes VRX-8, a virtual appliance designed for data centers and capable of supporting up to 1Gbps throughput. The company says the appliance will help speed backup and disaster recovery by reducing the number of bytes needed to transfer the data. The software is the same as that on Silver Peak NX physical appliances and its VX virtual appliances. VRX-8 runs as a Virtual Machine (VM) on VMware ESX (Version 4.0 or later) hypervisors.

Recently patented in the software improves the reduction of traffic by 50% compared to its previous deduplication capabilities, the company says.

The software upgrade also includes a customizable dashboard for Silver Peak's Global Management System to produce views of performance as its devices replicate over the WAN. The dashboard can also be used to troubleshoot performance problems by separating problems with the network from problems with storage itself, the company says.

The software also supports Hyper-V environments, which Silver Peak recommends for use in branch offices that have WAN links up to 4Mbps. For larger links, such as those to data centers, the company recommends using VMware ESX as the virtual environment.