Silver Peak WAN Optimization Enhances Amazon Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Silver Peak Systems have come to an agreement whereby the Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) software of the Santa Clara, California-based company will be accessible via the Amazon cloud platform. There are many advantages to this move, including the increase in speed, efficiency and savings in cost of WAN optimization provided to data and storage based on the cloud.

The director of marketing at Silver Peak, Jeff Aaron, said: “If the customer or partner is using the Amazon cloud to move data, their performance often suffers as they move data in or out of the cloud. Their costs can also be high and difficult to predict if you're paying based on the amount of data you're taking out of the cloud. Also, there are other issues to consider, such as security. So, these customers can activate our device within the cloud in order to optimize traffic, to lower the cost of the traffic and to secure that traffic.”

Access to Silver Peak's WAN optimization service can be given to enterprises and small businesses, and this will be made available via the Amazon Martketplace. It will be possible for them to increase their service within the cloud, similar to other cloud-based provisions. Another point of concern is the licensing, which will be completed through Silver Peak. However, Aaron commented that both companies are creating abilities to sell those licenses through Amazon as well.

Aaron said: “We expect that by the end of the year, our customers will be able to get a subscription through Amazon, and turn it on by the hour, by the month, or whatever they need.”

Broad area connections have the ability to cause lacking application performance and slow data transfers, especially as cloud-based data centers may be long distances from a customer’s enterprise data center. The need to reduce costs and handle bandwidth requirements and network quality issues is addressed through the WAN optimization; this strives to minimize and control the traffic. As a result, there will be substantial savings, and up to 20 times more output.

Aaron added: “We partly view WAN optimization as the solution for channel partners focused on networking issues. We also have channels who are storage-oriented, who are not really selling WAN optimization, per se. They are selling our replication acceleration capability, which is a different environment. The networking people understand how it lowers bandwidth costs, and how it's improves the performance of centralized applications and data. Our storage partners, on the other hand, understand that this solution helps you to replicate off-site and lower your DR costs.”

All data and applications are sped-up through the Silver Peak Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and also a part of this is Web and replication traffic, through which all major hypervisors are aided.

Finally, Aaron stated that: “If the partners are working with an end user that wants to optimize applications, lower their bandwidth costs, and do things like improved DR, they're going to turn to a solution like Silver Peak. Many are already familiar with our capabilities. This [delivery mechanism] is just another alternative for getting Silver Peak involved in that equation.” (CY) Link