Silver Peak last week rolled out what it claims to be the first Gigabit WAN acceleration product, the NX-9000.

The NX-9000 supports up to 4Gbps of bi-directional LAN traffic and 1Gbps of bi-directional WAN traffic, along with 8TB of local data store available for deduplication of WAN data. It has 4 to 10 times the throughput of other competitive offerings, according to Silver Peak’s claims.

The NX-9000 includes two 10Gbps interfaces and four 1Gbps interfaces. It has EtherChannel bonding for physical connectivity between Silver Peak appliances and network elements. The NX-9000 supports over 256,000 simultaneous TCP flows, allowing hundreds of remote offices to be connected to a single appliance.

The appliance performs encryption of data in hardware and optimizes TCP and UDP traffic. It also accommodates latency sensitive traffic generated by Citrix or data replication and applications with dynamic data formats such as AutoCAD and Microsoft Excel.

The NX-9000, the largest in Silver Peak’s family of WAN acceleration appliances, is focused on high volume data environments such as SAN replication, and on access to centralized databases, video streaming and application delivery.

It’s WAN deduplication process – called Network Memory – works with latency sensitive traffic and both TCP and non-TCP applications.

The appliance addresses out of order and lost packets using adaptive Forward Error Correction and Packet Order Correction. In addition it is possible to set QoS requirements.

The appliance competes with Riverbed and Cisco.

The NX-9000 starts at $260,000 and is expected to be available in August.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.