Silver Peak Accelerates Amazon Cloud Through Virtual WAN Optimization

"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," said Jeff Aaron, director of marketing at Silver Peak. "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."

According to Aaron, enterprises and small businesses can access Silver Peak's WAN optimization service through the Amazon Marketplace, and simply turn up their service within the cloud, as they might do with any other cloud-based offering. Licensing must still be finalized through Silver Peak, but Aaron says that the two companies are developing the capability to sell those licenses through Amazon, as well.

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"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," said Aaron.

Given that cloud-based data centers can be long distances from the customer's enterprise data center, wide area connections can potentially cause poor application performance and slow data transfers. WAN optimization serves to minimize and control the traffic as a means of reducing costs, bandwidth requirements and network quality issues. Aaron said that such capabilities can result in substantial savings and as much as 20 times more throughput.

"We partly view WAN optimization as the solution for channel partners focused on networking issues," Aaron explained. "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."

The Silver Peak Amazon Machine Image (AMI) accelerates all data and applications, including Web and replication traffic, and supports all major hypervisors.

"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," added Aaron. "Many are already familiar with our capabilities. This [delivery mechanism] is just another alternative for getting Silver Peak involved in that equation."

PUBLISHED March 1, 2013