Silver Peak WAN-acceleration boxes touts 40% better transfer times

Silver Peak is announcing new software that cuts the time for WAN data transfers by about 40% below the reduction capability of its previous software version.

The upgrades in the company’s Silver Peak 2.0 software are designed to have the most impact on traffic-transfer times across high-bandwidth connections where latency problems can affect TCP rates so severely that the pipes never get filled.

Two key adjustments account for the improved times. First, with the new software, Silver Peak has adjusted its algorithms that help improve how well its WAN-optimization appliances recognize patterns within traffic streams. The patterns are stored locally, so they don’t have to be sent in their entirety the next time the same pattern needs to be sent. Instead, Silver Peak appliances send a pointer to the patterns, reducing the amount of data clogging WAN connections, the company says.

In addition, the new software enables the appliances to store and retrieve these patterns more quickly to and from local disks, further reducing delay by improving the I/O subsystems used to transfer repetitive data patterns to and from the disks on which they are cached.

These two changes in the software improve data-transfer times by 30% to 50%. So a transfer that took 10 hours before would take six hours or so, the company says.

Silver Peak devices perform pattern-recognition at the byte level, unlike some other vendors’ gear that sample blocks of traffic of a certain length looking for identical matches. Silver Peak says this enables its gear to abbreviate real-time traffic, such as video, because it can separate identical content from the varying time stamp attached to each packet. Without this capability, it could not effectively reduce video.

Among others, Silver Peak competes against Cisco, Juniper and Riverbed.