Startup Eyes WAN Optimization Market

The WAN optimization arena continues to pick up steam with this week’s launch of Silver Peak Systems.

WAN optimization has been attracting some of the biggest names in networking, with Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, F5 Networks and Juniper Networks all snapping up WAN optimization and application acceleration vendors this year.

Silver Peak, founded in 2004, unveiled its NX Series appliances, which aim to improve WAN performance while simultaneously eliminating the need for the variety of e-mail, file and Web servers that typically populate branch offices. The company is recruiting partners and plans to push all sales through the channel, said Rick Tinsley, president and CEO of Silver Peak, Mountain View, Calif.

“Enterprise companies have servers dispersed throughout branch offices all over the country or the world. They’d like to consolidate because of management issues, but historically that has affected performance,” said Steve DeNato, sales manager at Vega Business Technologies, a San Diego-based integrator.

Enter Silver Peak, which Tinsley says harnesses the best of both worlds. The NX Series appliances include disk drives to store network data locally as it is requested by branch users. After a file is requested from headquarters the first time and is stored, subsequent requests are served from the local appliance. Through the vendor’s Network Memory technology, only data that has changed is transmitted from headquarters after that.

The Silver Peak strategy doesn’t carry the same security risks as traditional distributed architectures, Tinsley said. “We’re not storing files. The data just looks like gobbledygook,” he said. “We’re looking at traffic patterns, so there’s no sense that this is a file or a Web page.”

Patrick Wilson, co-founder and CTO of IT Surgeons, an integrator in San Ramon, Calif., is running Silver Peak pilots with two health-care customers where WAN performance is critical for sharing large files and images. “They’ve been able to remove e-mail servers and consolidate data,” Wilson said. “They can share more data so their workflow productivity goes up,” he added.

Pricing for the NX Series, scheduled to ship in October, starts at $9,995.