News

posted on 19 May 2008 10:20

The NX-9000 is Silver Peak's new top-of-the-range Wide Area Data Services (WADS) product, with quad core Xeon power enabling the industry's first Gbit/s WAN acceleration appliance.

The NX-9000 is the first WAN acceleration appliance to support 10GBit/s interfaces. Silver Peak says its data throughput is 1Gbit/s across WAN links and 4Gbit/s across LAN links, both bi-directionally. There can be two 10Gbit/s interfaces and four 1Gbit/s interfaces with EtherChannel bonding. This equips the NX-9000 to be used in large data centers with inter-center links of up to OC48 class (2.5Gbit/s), for example, regional hubs, multi-national data centers and disaster recovery sites.

Jeff Aaron, Silver Peak's Marketing Director, said the NX-9000: "has a lot of processing power and software that uses it." It can deal with up to 256,000 simultaneous TCP/IP flows, meaning about 25,600 TCP/IP users as the average user has ten flows.

Silver Peaks says it operates up to four times faster than competing products, such as Riverbed's 6020 and Cisco's WAE 7371, at WAN speeds, twelve times faster than its nearest competitor at LAN speeds, and five times faster at TCP/IP flow speeds.

Like other NX-series products it runs Silver Peak's network integrity features to deal with congestion, packet loss and unauthorised access. It also de-duplicates all IP WAN traffic and applies network acceleration techniques to overcome latency problems, such as reducing TCP/IP 'chattiness'. The NX series also offer wire-speed, hardware encryption.

Silver Peak positions itself as an enterprise network acceleration company and says it scales higher than WADS market leader Riverbed.

It is a privately-held company, founded in 2004 which first shipped product in 2005. There was a Series D funding round in January which took total funding to $62 million. It is a wide area data services company that focusses on network acceleration at the IP level, a layer up from TCP.

There are a range of Silver Peak NX appliances, ranging from the entry-level NX-2000, for branch offices, through the NX-3000, NX-5000, NX-7000 and NX-8000 to the new NX-9000. Like the NX-8000 the NX-9000 has a 8TB of local RAID-protected disk storage for deduplication.

The NX-9000 will ship in August and its list price is $259,995.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}