To get the most from WAN acceleration devices, it helps to know what's happening not only across the WAN environment but also inside associated data center environments. To that end, Silver Peak Systems this week announced it is teaming up with EMC to provide customers with better visibility across storage and WAN environments.

The two companies are working to bolster integration between Silver Peak’s NX appliances and EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager and IP Performance Manager. The idea is that if customers deploy Silver Peak’s WAN acceleration devices in conjunction with EMC’s root-cause analysis and impact assessment tools, they’ll have better visibility into storage and WAN environments. The combined solutions can simplify device management as well as lower the costs associated with infrastructure troubleshooting, Silver Peak says.

“The WAN provides a unique intersection between storage devices and the underlying network infrastructure,” said Jeff Aaron, vice president of marketing at Silver Peak, in a statement. “By deploying Silver Peak’s NX appliances in conjunction with EMC Smarts, we are bringing the two worlds closer together for better end-to-end visibility and control.”

Silver Peak’s NX appliances tackle bandwidth, latency and packet loss problems through means such as de-duplication of WAN traffic, forward error correction, and QoS. The company’s sweet spot is optimizing applications running over high capacity WAN links -- such as data center replication/backup and disaster recovery applications -- by addressing their distinct performance, scalability and configuration challenges.

EMC Smarts (which EMC gained in its 2004 acquisition of network management vendor SMARTS) is IT management software that’s designed to help companies tackle root-cause analysis, event correlation and troubleshooting. IP Availability Manager, specifically, is focused on diagnosing problems with business services and the underlying infrastructure as well as assessing the impact of potential problems. IP Performance Manager monitors network devices and works to pinpoint exceptions before devices fail (and before performance issues affect business services/users).

EMC through its Select program is a reseller of Silver Peak’s NX appliances and Global management System software.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.