Wide area acceleration vendor Silver Peak Systems has added several new optimization features to its appliances that overcome packet delivery issues on high-capacity WAN links.

The NX appliances now ship with three new software features – Dynamic Forward Error Correction (FEC); Packet Order Correction (POC); and Packet Striping. These features are expected to solve the effects of packet loss, out-of-order packets and flow restrictions across the WAN.

The Dynamic FEC capability is used to reconstitute lost packets at the end of transmission and avoid re-transmitting lost data. Silver peak estimates that FEC can reduce loss on WAN links up to 500Mbps in size.

FEC has been used for a long time in the physical-link layer, where it checks and corrects bit errors and ensures that upper-layer protocols receive error-free datagrams. FEC works by adding an additional error-recovery packet, which contains information that can be used to reconstruct individual packets, to each ‘x’ number of packets sent.

Using POC, the NX appliances re-sequence packets after transmission. Data arriving at its destination that is out-of-order is re-ordered based on POC.

Silver Peak’s NX appliances also allow all packets to be stripped and spread across multiple IP flows. This capability allows data transmission to overcome flow limits in routers and firewalls. 

These new features are available now; existing NX appliance users need only to do a firmware upgrade to enable the capabilities.

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Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.