Networking
WAN accelerator breaks the Gig barrier
Size matters, claims Silver Peak
By Bryan Betts, Techworld | Published 08:00, 20 May 08
Silver Peak has launched what it claimed is the biggest WAN accelerator ever - a box able to optimise, de-duplicate, compress and encrypt 1Gbit/s of WAN traffic.
Called the NX-9000, it's also the first accelerator with 10Gbits/s WAN interfaces "to scale for the future," said Silver Peak marketing director Jeff Aaron. It supports up to 4Gbits/s of bidirectional LAN-side traffic and 1Gbit/s of bidirectional WAN traffic, he added.
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That's several times faster than the published capacity of competitors such as Riverbed and Juniper. They can handle several hundred Mbits/s when several devices stacked together, or if some acceleration features are turned off. Cisco's WAE 7371 can handle a 1Gbits/s WAN but has less than half the LAN-side capacity of the NX-9000.
Aaron said that the new boxes are aimed at applications such as datacentre replication, over-the-WAN backup and the like. That's different from the branch office focus of most other WAN optimisers, he claimed.
"The main differences between datacentre and branch needs are that datacentre devices are more often deployed out of band, not in-line," he explained. "It means they're a little more complicated to deploy, where branch boxes can be plug & play.
"The datacentre means more traffic as well, so there's throughput issues, so it needs more disk capacity. The traffic profile is different too, with fewer user applications and more host-to-host applications."
