abednarz
Executive Editor

Silver Peak, EMC tie-up boosts WAN visibility

Opinion
Mar 26, 20092 mins

* Deal tightens integration between Silver Peak's NX appliances and EMC Smarts root-cause analysis and impact assessment tools

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.

abednarz

Ann Bednarz is the executive editor of Network World. Ann is a longtime IT journalist and has spent 26 years writing and editing for Network World, where she has worked as a news reporter, managed product testing and reviews, and developed features and how-to articles for an audience of network professionals and data center managers. Over the last two years, she has conceived and edited award-winning content for Network World that includes 2025 Jesse H. Neal Award finalists, 2025 Azbee Award regional winners and national finalists, and 2024 Eddie & Ozzie Award finalists.

Ann holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture and spent the early part of her journalism career writing about architectural design and construction. In her free time, she keeps those skills alive through DIY projects.

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