VMware's NSX and Silver Peak's Data Acceleration Software Integrated
VMware's NSX and Silver Peak's Data Acceleration Software Integrated by UCStrategies Staff
Silver Peak is a WAN optimization specialist which last week announced integration capabilities between its data acceleration software and VMware’s new network virtualization technology. The company says that this move will mean that application and traffic flow between virtual machines can be strengthened.
The NSX is a game-changer, according to VMware, and will allow virtualized data center networks to become available by changing high-end features of switches, routers and other networking gear into software.
Silver Peak joins Hewlett-Packard, Juniper Networks and Brocade as vendors whose offerings will combine well with NSX.
Santa Clara, California-based Silver Peak is combining its Agility data acceleration software with VMware NSX, so that the redirection and optimization of traffic between different virtual machines will be enabled, and there will no longer be the need for manually setting routers or other networking hardware.
This software-based approach means that administrators can optimize performance of individual workloads as they move between different data centers, remote offices and the cloud.
The CEO at Silver Peak, David Hughes, said that users will be able to use the Agility software and redirect virtual machine traffic via a simple point-and-click system.
Hughes said: “We've been working closely with VMware to integrate with some of their software-defined data center APIs that come under the NSX umbrella so that we can redirect traffic from any workload to any other virtual machine, including our own virtual machines running our Silver Peak software. And what this lets us do is basically point-and-click workload optimization with no need to understand networking or what's going on behind the scenes.”
Mavenspire is an Annapolis, Maryland-based solution provider and Silver Peak partner, and the company’s principal, Michael Tanenhaus, stated that by working with Silver Peak’s Agility software, it will be possible to improve the NSX platform beyond basic network virtualization services.
Tanenhaus said: “VMware has announced the platform for taking basic network services and decoupling them from the physical data center. With Agility, Silver Peak has stepped up and shown us how to extend network virtualization beyond basic services, providing enhanced quality of service between workloads, hypervisors, clusters and data centers.”
The Silver Peak-NSX integration also highlights the continuous transformation which the company is going through, from a hardware-focused WAN optimization player to a software-focused one. The industry's first "data center-class" virtual WAN optimization appliance, the VRX-8, was launched by Silver Peak three years ago, and according to Hughes, around 50 percent of all appliances shipped by the company are virtual.
However, Hughes also underlined the fact that the integrated Agility-NSX environment is designed specifically for software-defined data centers, and could take customers a number of months to improve the product. Hughes stated: “It may be six months to 12 months before it starts to get picked up by people in a broader sense.”
Over the last year, talk of software-defined networking has been very popular, and vendors like VMware position virtualized networks in order to provision applications faster and make data centers more flexible and efficient. According to IDC, the research firm, the SDN market is projected to be worth $3.7 billion by 2016. (CY) Link