Data-intensive processes such as SAN replication and remote office backups can take a big toll on WAN performance. To help weather the surge, Silver Peak Systems' new high-end WAN optimization appliance (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products), unveiled this week, can reach 1Gbps throughput. It's designed to accelerate high-volume traffic flowing between data centers, as well as traffic between data centers and remote corporate sites.

The NX-9000 supports up to 4Gbps of bidirectional LAN side traffic and 1Gbps of bidirectional WAN side traffic, says Jeff Aaron, director of marketing at Silver Peak. “These numbers are with all features turned on, everything you can throw at the box,” Aaron says. “That includes de-duplication, compression, QoS and also our wire-speed encryption.”

The NX-9000 has options for two 10Gbps physical WAN ports that each supports 1Gbps optimized throughput, and four 1Gbps ports that serve as LAN connections. “There are more routers out there, more hosts out there that are using 10 Gig interfaces. They’re pumping out data at those speeds, so we need to be able to support those speeds,” Aaron says.

In addition, the device supports more than 256,000 simultaneous TCP flows. “If you have many replication streams going between data centers, if you have many offices connecting to a data center, your flow counts can easily get pretty high,” Aaron says.

The NX-9000 includes an 8TB hard drive that’s used to store traffic patterns the NX-9000 caches as part of Silver Peak’s Network Memory de-duplication processes. To address lost and out-of-order packets, the NX-9000 uses Silver Peak’s forward error correction (FEC) and packet order correction. FEC technology is used to reconstitute lost packets at the far end of a WAN link in real-time, eliminating the need to retransmit lost data. With packet order correction, Silver Peak’s NX appliances re-sequence packets on the far end of a WAN link, prior to delivery, to avoid re-transmissions that occur when packets arrive out of order.

The NX-9000 costs $260,000.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.