Friday, October 28, 2005
Local Instance Networking by Silver Peak
These appliances are designed to provide high performance IT services to remote offices from a central datacenter, i.e. without having local server infrastructure. Instead of just doing compression and QoS like conventional WAN optimization appliances, Silver Peak goes a step further by analyzing the network traffic on a byte level and by detecting recurring byte patterns. Those byte patterns are cached locally on disks. This is similar to the WAFS approach (wide area file system), however they are not optimizing on the application layer but on the networking / packet layer. They call this approach "Network Memory". They even support high availability deployment (1+1 for N+1 with failover and load-balancing). In addition they support compression, per-application QoS, and "latency and loss mitigation". I have no idea how "latency mitigation" works ... They support inline deployment / bridge mode(between Ethernet LAN and WAN-Router) or out-of-path deployment (router mode) where only some traffic is routed through the appliance.