Network Memory is Silver Peak’s term for its WAN de-duplication technology
Silver Peak Systems has been awarded a patent for its de-duplication technology, which plays a key role in the vendor’s WAN optimization products.
Silver Peak was issued U.S. Patent 7,571,344, titled “Ensuring Data Integrity in Network Memory.” Network Memory is Silver Peak’s term for its WAN de-duplication technology, which inspects inbound and outbound WAN traffic and stores a single local instance of data on each of its NX appliances.
The purpose is to avoid sending repetitive data across the WAN, saving bandwidth and speeding application performance.
“Prior to sending information across the WAN, NX Series appliances compare real-time traffic streams to patterns stored using Network Memory. If a match exists, a short reference pointer is sent to the remote Silver Peak appliance, instructing it to deliver the traffic pattern from its local instance,” Silver Peak explains on its Web site.
In the patent application Silver Peak details some of the benefits of de-duplication in a branch office scenario (note: I removed some numeric annotations so the text is more readable):
“The network memory system advantageously provides increased productivity, reduced IT costs, and enhanced data integrity and compliance. For example, the network memory system achieves the simple administration of centralized server systems whereby the central servers store the primary copy of the data. The network memory system improves application performance and data access in the branch office and the central office because not every response to a data request travels over the communication network from the central servers. The branch appliance and the central appliance also store to and retrieve from a local copy of the data for subsequent exchanges of the data.”
Two other techniques Silver Peak’s NX appliances rely on are Network Acceleration to overcome WAN latency; and Network Integrity to correct packet delivery issues and intelligently allocate WAN resources.
