Silver Peak has aggressively championed virtual-appliance-based solutions in both the data center and branch office, with a wide range of virtual appliance configurations for flexible deployment models. However, Silver Peak also offers a wide range of physical appliances, from a small branch office appliance to a high-capacity data center appliance. Silver Peak is maintaining its leadership position in the data-center-to-data-center segment, but continues to expand a comprehensive solution for the branch-office-to-data-center WOC segment. Its WAN path control solution now offers a comprehensive hybrid WAN (SD-WAN) that includes meshed tunneling overlay with path conditioning, multipath WAN control, and optimization for both external SaaS and internal enterprise applications via the Unity fabric and distributed WAN edge devices. The new Unity solution includes the innovative Cloud Intelligence and Advanced Exterior WAN routing, which optimizes external SaaS applications and monitors and maintains performance metrics for more than 30 SaaS services. Consider Silver Peak for all mainstream branch office optimization needs and, in particular, for all data center replication projects.
Strengths
Silver Peak offers a very strong solution for optimizing data center storage replication, with segment-leading products and good strategic alliances with data center infrastructure companies, such as VMware, EMC, Hitachi and Dell. Silver Peak has combined products, price, packaging and tailored deployment models to allow storage administrators to deploy WAN optimization specifically for remote replication workloads without a requirement to reconfigure the routed network. The company has a large portfolio of appliances, with flexibility in deployment options (hardware and virtual appliances) and pricing (subscription, perpetual and pay as you grow) with options to convert licenses for free. Silver Peak's dual-ended path selection features link quality assessment and remediation as well as topology awareness. It supports single-ended link load balancing for direct Internet access from branch offices, including IPsec tunneling.
Cautions
Silver Peak support of traffic identification, classification and visibility is less granular than segment-leading vendors. Silver Peak still lacks SoftWOC capabilities for mobile users, but its strategy is to use WAN optimization distributed in the WAN via its Unity fabric to address this requirement. The company's video-on-demand support does not provide specific video format caching or support of remote streaming to offload the origin server, although it does incorporate stream splitting and remote office format-independent file caching to offload the network. As it continues to focus on its network-based application optimization approach, Silver Peak offers fewer application-protocol-specific optimizations than other leading vendors. Silver Peak does not have any service provider partners, but a new organization has been created with the aim of establishing service provider partnerships.
Strengths
Silver Peak offers a very strong solution for optimizing data center storage replication, with segment-leading products and good strategic alliances with data center infrastructure companies, such as VMware, EMC, Hitachi and Dell. Silver Peak has combined products, price, packaging and tailored deployment models to allow storage administrators to deploy WAN optimization specifically for remote replication workloads without a requirement to reconfigure the routed network. The company has a large portfolio of appliances, with flexibility in deployment options (hardware and virtual appliances) and pricing (subscription, perpetual and pay as you grow) with options to convert licenses for free. Silver Peak's dual-ended path selection features link quality assessment and remediation as well as topology awareness. It supports single-ended link load balancing for direct Internet access from branch offices, including IPsec tunneling.
Cautions
Silver Peak support of traffic identification, classification and visibility is less granular than segment-leading vendors. Silver Peak still lacks SoftWOC capabilities for mobile users, but its strategy is to use WAN optimization distributed in the WAN via its Unity fabric to address this requirement. The company's video-on-demand support does not provide specific video format caching or support of remote streaming to offload the origin server, although it does incorporate stream splitting and remote office format-independent file caching to offload the network. As it continues to focus on its network-based application optimization approach, Silver Peak offers fewer application-protocol-specific optimizations than other leading vendors. Silver Peak does not have any service provider partners, but a new organization has been created with the aim of establishing service provider partnerships.