What Do You Think of Silver Peak’s NX Accelerators?

We are in the process of rolling out a Silver Peak WAN acceleration to our 10 sites. I am really happy with the product. It enables our remote sites to work in applications over the WAN as if they were sitting at the main office working locally. It's especially fast with file shares, HTTP, and SQL client applications. The effect has been dramatic.

We evaluated a competitor's product first but that one was much more touchy with specific types of applications and broke one of our most critical. The support on getting the other vendor's product up and running properly left much to be desired. Silver Peak has been great in assisting with our rollout and being available to answer questions. Silver Peak's staff is highly capable as is their product.

EMC has been working with Silver Peak to reduce the WAN bandwidth needs for remote data replication. The focus with my customers in Atlanta has been on SRDF/A. Silver Peak's ability to clean up noisy links, pull out redundant data, and add in data encryption has them very high on the customer review lists.

We are in the process of rolling out approximately 70 Silver Peak devices over two seperate MPLS networks and over 30 sites around the globe. We tested all acceleration products and worked to a rigid testing criteria before deciding on Silver Peak. When we took into account the traffic which other products bypass (without reporting on) and Silver Peak don't then they gave the best reduction and overall performance. They are also the only device we found which claim to and appear to work on Citrix traffic once we disabled compression and encryption on the servers.

Importantly, having piloted a number of different products in our environment, they were the only ones that managed to go in without breaking any of our apps.

I am extremely impressed with the stability and ease of use of their product. It just 'does what it says on the tin'. It is the best real world product designed to work on a large network and not just look good in a test lab bake-off.

Try the GMS it really makes things simple.

For the past 8 years I have been working with different WAN/Data optimization vendors. I was followed this technology with both a technical and business interest. With the introduction of the Silver Peak product into the market place for the first time the bar has risen by a multiple of factors. The Silver Peak NX was the first product to take the market beyond the basic low throughput remote office solutions (less then 45Mibts/sec of to be optimized throughput), to new levels not even dreamed of before with its ability to optimize upwards of 1.6Gbits/sec of to be optimize traffic. But that is not all that this product improved upon. It also broke out of the mold of just optimizing TCP data, with its ability to optimize any IP based data, while still enhancing the short comings of TCP over the WAN. The NX also added forward error correction (FEC), and both AES-128 encryption at rest and encryption in flight! So, let the games begin! Now every vendor out there is playing catch up, and I expect there to be great advancements in this market place over the coming months. And who’s the winner; we are the customers, the folks who are tired of waiting months for circuit upgrades, and having to pay higher and higher prices, month after month.

We are in the midst of a competitive proof of concept in Tennessee. We are entertaining the usual players but the SP device has demonstrated superior functionality. Compression and scalability are best in class by far. RTO/RPO objectives are easily met and the support has been world class. Definitely the way to go for SRDF and enterprise wide deployments.

With data centers spread across continents, Intercontinental data replication within the established SLA(s), for disaster recovery was key to the organization(s) business needs. At a technical level the necessity to transfer more data without having to increase the WAN bandwidth was key.
We evaluated various WAN optimization products before ultimately choosing the Silver peak NX series appliances. The array of technical solutions that Silver peak brings to the table is very impressive, a few key being:
a. Network memory technology: The advanced fingerprinting technology to inspect byte streams as they are sent between various locations and generating local repositories of redundant information is classic.
b. Hardware based encryption: 128 bit AES encryption of the local data stores and IPsec for data traversal, the NX series allows the security personnel to have a beer, no problems
c. Support for a wide range of applications.
Administratively,
a. The solution is very easy to deploy. The box(s) arrive pre configured and require ~15mts for them to be up and running.
b. Even in cases where pre-configuration is not possible, the configuration steps are so few it takes less than an hour to configure a device. It also makes troubleshooting that much easier.
c. GMS is a very neat solution to manage all the appliances and has a great reporting functionality.

My customer in Tennessee was struggling with limited available bandwidth even though their business needs were growing. Included in these business needs is the ability to successfully replicate production data using SRDF/A across the country to meet DR guidelines and compliance. Silverpeak was brought in and a POC was done connecting two 7500s across the customers WAN. Immediately we saw improvements in the optimization of the replication traffic going across the WAN. The longer the appliances ran the better the statistics became. Prior, this customer was spending enormous amounts of money on "bursting" charges related to over subscribing of their existing circuit. Not only did these "burst" immediately go away, but the performance of SRDF/A replicaiton improved dramatically. Before Siverpeak came along this customer was looking at increasing their circuit bandwidth at a substantial cost to the business. Because of the optimazation that Silverpeak provided they not only don't have to increase the circuit bandwidth, but they are able to replicate additional data that wasn't possible before due to their contraints. This translates into lowered adminstrative and operational cost for the customer with a gain in business function.

We tested boxes from Blue Coat Systems, Cisco, Riverbed Technology and Silver Peak Systems in a true enterprise context, with a massive test bed pushing data over multiple T-3 and T-1 links. After pounding the systems with the most popular enterprise applications, we’re inclined to believe the hype.

Silver Peak's NX appliances outperformed the field in most tests and offer strong scalability and intuitive traffic reporting tools.

Measuring CIFS response time

The Silver Peak NX appliances were next most efficient overall, with speedups of three to 16 times (again, with the most improvement shown for low-bandwidth sites), followed by the Cisco and Blue Coat appliances.

A faster web

We measured acceleration of HTTP traffic in two tests, one with 248 and one with 2,480 concurrent users. The results were a bit surprising: while the products delivered web traffic as much as seven times faster than a baseline test without acceleration, performance didn’t necessarily improve as we added more users.

Silver Peak’s NX appliances were the fastest, tripling transaction and data rates and reducing response time by around 2.5 times when handling 248 users.

Concurrent connections

Our final performance test determined the maximum number of TCP connections each system could optimise. This is an important metric for enterprises with many remote offices and hub-and-spoke network designs, where connection counts for data-centre devices can run into the tens of thousands. All the devices we tested get into that tens-of-thousands range, but there was more than a fourfold difference between the highest and lowest capacities.

Riverbed says the higher-end 5520 model can optimise 15,000 connections. We were unable to confirm that result, but our tests did show that each 3520 slightly outperformed its rated limit of 6,000 connections to get to the 12,200 total mentioned previously.

We had a dilemma, our DR site is at a facility that could only be reached by an expensive OC3 circuit and we were running out of bandwidth. During the past year we have migrated from Tape Backups to doing Snapshots between our NetApp storage appliances. We talked to Silver Peak and other WAN acceleration/compression vendors at a Network World Interop show and found that Silver Peak was the one geared for doing Data Center backups and could handle the OC3 WAN Speeds that we needed.
We brought in Silver peak to demo their Appliances with a minimum goal of achieving 75Gbps/hour, which was easily met. During the demo we faced problems such as packet loss and high latency. Silver peak showed that using their FEC correction capabilities they were able to alleviate those issues. The packet loss was due to a backbone issue with out network which was resolved quickly.
We have purchased two 7600s and a GMS to be deployed later this month.

I like the NX product. At my previous firm with Warren (commented above) our team evaluated and piloted five other comparable products from the top tier vendors and decided on Silver Peak.
I agree with many comments already made and add that besides the enormous scale and capacity of NX boxes another significant differentiator is their smart choice to work at layer 3 and operate transparently of apps and transport protocols. This strategy, rather than building and maintaining code to deal with specific apps (which will change), provides great benefits across the typical range of applications and protocols in general use at organisations today. Going forward it’s going to provide a lot of flexibility as the traffic profile changes and develops, especially as more and more centralisation occurs and data is moved between branch offices and large data centres.