For the final installment in our “ADS Customers Speak” series we ask Silver Peak’s customers to share their experiences with the NX product line. Arriving on the distributed application delivery system (ADS) scene a mere four years ago, Silver Peak is a relative market newcomer. During its short life, however, Silver Peak has hatched an impressive lineup of appliances ranging from its ‘papa bear’ NX-9000 that it claims is the largest WAN acceleration appliance on the market, to the ‘baby bear’ NX-2000 at home in small branch offices.
Scalability is Silver Peak’s primary claim to fame-with data replication, disaster recovery, and business continuity the most touted uses for the NX product lineup. Silver Peak aims for the rarified top of the market with its NX-9000, which supports 1Gbps links and boasts 8 TB of local storage. This firepower is most needed for massive inter-datacenter replication, which explains Silver Peak’s recent reseller partnership with EMC. Silver Peak’s low-end NX-2000 product supports 2 Mbps links and has 250 GB of onboard storage. Silver Peak also sells the NX-3000, NX-5000, NX-7000, and NX-8000 to fill many niches in the scalability spectrum.
The Silver Peak product line employs dictionary compression, header compression, dynamic compression, forward error control, traffic marking, priority handling, and traffic shaping to optimize WAN application performance. Silver Peak’s patent pending Network MemoryTM technology is a form of dictionary compression that reduces payload by detecting patterns in transmitted data, tagging the patterns, and passing the data and the associated tag along to the destination device. When the same data segment subsequently passes through the source NX box, the device recognizes it and sends the tag (instead of the segment) to the destination device, which then injects the segment into the traffic stream.
Silver Peak’s Global Management System (GMS) provides centralized NX device administration and enables enterprises to generate reports about such things as application and WAN performance, and bandwidth utilization.
If you have deployed an NX solution, tell us what you think. Does it live up to your expectations? What were your impressions? A simple “I like it”, “I have mixed feelings”, or “I hate it” response is fine-but if you have insight to share with the community, then talk all you want. You can post a reply to this blog using your name or anonymously.
Oh – and don’t forget to fill out our 2008 Application Performance Best Practices Survey here and qualify to win an Apple iPod Touch 16 GB. We will write up the survey results in a Network World feature article and we will share additional details of what we learn on this blog.
