Silver Peak Systems has announced a multi-gigabit-per-second WAN utilization solution for data centers running atop Microsoft’s Windows Server with Hyper-V. A virtual WAN accelerator can overcome the limitations of the WAN, whether the latter is derived from local connectivity or a fiber link between data centers, by improving throughput through a combination of caching, compression, data and latency reduction, and quality-of-service. The end goal is to minimize the amount of data traffic being passed via the WAN connection itself, the slowest link in the chain. Silver Peak’s software runs atop major hypervisors such as Windows Server and VMware, and competes with physical hardware from companies including Riverbed, Juniper, and BlueCoat. Vivian Xu, director of virtualization product management for Silver Peak, wrote in a statement that the company has taken advantage of the improvements Microsoft has made in Windows Hyper-V Server 2012. In a typical deployment pattern, each end of the WAN would include a Microsoft Hyper-V machine, set up in router mode, with the Silver Peak software running atop of it. Data passing over the WAN might include replication/backup, Big Data analytics, and HTTP traffic. Silver Peak differentiates their virtual products by the WAN capacity each can handle; the multi-gigabit solution hasn’t been given a formal name, but may end up being a feature of the VRX-8, which can handle up to 1 Gbit/s of WAN traffic. (Solutions that can handle 50 Mbits/s to 200 Mbits/s are also available.) The VRX-8 can accept up to 256,000 simultaneous connections, using AES and IPSec disk and traffic encryption. In a review of Silver Peak VX technology published last October, InfoWorld wore that “the VX optimized WAN traffic as well as or better than a comparable physical chassis (the Riverbed Steelhead 2050) in all but one scenario.” But Riverbed also provides acceleration for mobile workers via its Steelhead Mobile solution, which runs on laptops—Silver Peak has yet to offer such a solution, which accelerates WWAN traffic using the same caching/QOS/data reduction techniques as the offerings for the data center.   Image: Silver Peak