News

posted on 06 June 2008 09:54

According to Datamonitor, EMC has dropped Cisco's WAN acceleration (WAAS) products from its Select price list and replaced them with Silver Peak's NX appliances.

WAN acceleration products are used to speed data transfers across wide area network links between data centers. They can radically reduce bandwidth amounts and transfer time for large files through a combination of network chattiness reduction and deletion of redundant file contents (deduplication).

EMC has products, such as SRDF, that replicate data from its Symmetrix arrays across WAN links. WAN acceleration appliances speed the transfer, ensuring that the remote array is kept more up to date with the source Symmetrix, making for better disaster recovery arrangements.

EMC has included Silver Peak's NX-5000, 7000 and 8000 products on its price list for some time, with the arrangement being formally announced in February. The relationship is going really well with joint customer wins at TD Ameritrade, Yellowbook, AT&T
and elsewhere. 

It is thought that the new 1Gbit/s NX-9000 will also be included. EMC appears to be working with Cisco for remote office to head office links but preferring Silver Peak for data center to data center links.

Datamonitor also brings up the possibility of EMC buying Silver Peak.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor]}