Picking up where I left off last time, Silver Peak Systems’ CEO Rick Tinsley chatted with me about the three-year-old company’s security features, as well as the overlap between network and storage requirements.

NW: Early on, how did Silver Peak tackle data security?

From the start it was clear from customer feedback that our products needed to maintain -- at least -- or enhance the security aspects of the network. I remember one customer in particular, a financial services company in Chicago, said the last thing in the world he wanted was yet another disk drive in all his branch offices that wasn’t encrypted. The new generation of WAN acceleration products utilizes disk drive technology to store all the redundant data patterns, so that they can do the data reduction. We felt it was very important that the data that gets stored on the disk drive has to be encrypted. Otherwise, worst case, if someone broke into a branch office and stole a disk drive that had all sorts of social security or credit card numbers, that would be a real problem -- exactly the kind of problem customers were trying to get rid of by consolidating all their servers in a data center. It was fortunate that David [Hughes] started the company when he did, because had he started building these products a year or two earlier, it’s not clear we would have gotten that market feedback and we would have had unencrypted disk drive technology like everyone else. That would have been a big liability for us.

NW: Do you have plans to add SSL acceleration features to your devices?

You’ll have to stay tuned for the specific product announcements on SSL from Silver Peak. But, we were fortunate in our timing. We comprehended the requirements for security a couple of years ago. We designed hardware encryption, and we put hardware acceleration into all of our products. So that, let’s say, if and when we start to do the SSL acceleration, we will never be de-encrypting SSL traffic and storing the resulting traffic in the clear on our disk drive. We’ll always be storing that traffic on an encrypted mode within our disk drive. Because we have acceleration built in, we’ve got the horsepower to handle that type of application at a very high level of performance.

NW: Do you have any advice for companies shopping for WAN acceleration gear?

The best way to evaluate all these products is to test them. Put the products into your network and see who can do what. In particular, test the products in the most challenging and most comprehensive way that you can, and that means testing them on fat pipes and with all kinds of applications -- files, e-mail, replication, voice, video. Throw the kitchen sink at them and see which products can do what.

NW: Any other observations about what’s to come in the market?

What we’re doing with this new technology is kind of a blending of networking and storage. We’re putting a disk drive essentially into the data path of a network element, which is a pretty new and scary concept. But it’s interesting in terms of how these products are viewed by customers. This is one technology that clearly is cutting across the boundaries of networking and storage. Most of the time we talk to both networking people and storage people. A lot of the problems we’re addressing are things like replication or backup, which generally are functions owned by the storage department.

As a start-up, we figured out early on that we need to be literate as a storage vendor and be able to talk to storage personnel as well as the networking personnel. It’s really a very different requirement than traditional networking equipment, which was evaluated and purchased by the networking department, or traditional storage equipment, which was evaluated and purchased by the storage department. This is new territory. I think there will be some other technologies developed over the next several years that will force those two departments to in some ways merge or cooperate. Vendors like us will have to be competent and literate in both of those areas in order to succeed.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.