Silver Peak Unity Brings Intelligent WAN to Enterprise

Silver Peak announced its new Unity wide area network (WAN) fabric this week, allowing IT administrators to control and monitor their cloud connectivity for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications across any network. Unity finds the best path to the public cloud and on private networks, creating a consistent user experience, according to the company.

With the intelligent WAN fabric, IT administrators will be able to track the location of cloud services and monitor Internet traffic to help find the path of least resistance for their data. This, in turn, will help keep information flowing securely and quickly while also giving IT unprecedented insight into how their information is transferred.

“What used to be a fairly static world that you could control is kind of exploding into a big mess of Internet-enabled applications everywhere, [making it] harder and harder for IT managers to gain control,” said Damon Ennis, senior vice president of Products at Silver Peak, in an interview with The VAR Guy. “The reason we’re calling this Unity is its really giving that IT manager a unified view of his wide area network, cloud solutions and letting him run that whole thing over the Internet. For that IT manager, he regains that visibility and control that he probably lost as applications transitioned to the Internet.”

When the Silver Peak software is deployed in a company's data center or office, the system generates the Unity fabric, which acts as a network overlay to control and accelerate connectivity to any combination of enterprise services, IaaS resources and SaaS applications, according to an article in Channel Partners. Each separate instance on the Unity fabric communicates with Silver Peak’s Cloud Intelligence service, which continually aggregates changing web patterns and traffic information for the user. IT managers can view this through the Silver Peak Global Management System (GMS), which orchestrates the entire process and gives adminstrations control over deployment and cloud services.

Ennis said VARs are set to benefit from its new intelligent WAN because customers are increasingly looking to transition to the cloud and establish a global footprint with their wide area networks, and many of these companies are still unsure of how to do so on their own. Currently, Silver Peak is working with 300 reseller partners, with more expected to join its program soon.

Unity supports 30 of the most popular SaaS applications, including Salesforce.com (CRM) and Microsoft Office 365 (MSFT), Dropbox and Adobe Creative Cloud (ADBE). The company plans to continue adding support for additional applications over time, eventually hoping to reach full compatibility with all SaaS applications on the market.

Unity and the Cloud Intelligence service both are slated to be available at the end of August through Silver Peak’s channel partners. The Unity Cloud Intelligence subscription costs $5,000 per enterprise, per year with unlimited SaaS support, while individual Silver Peak software instances are available starting at $551 each.