Silver Peak Eyes New Enterprise Network With Nontraditional WAN Solution

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Santa Clara, California-based Silver Peak on Wednesday unveiled Unity, which the company calls an intelligent wide-area network (WAN) fabric that unified the enterprise network with the public cloud.

Silver Peak says Unity is different from traditional WAN optimization solutions because it closely tracks the location of cloud services and Internet “weather” to intelligently route traffic over a secure, optimal path. By keeping Cloud SaaS and IaaS traffic on the Unity fabric, Silver peak says IT gets something it’s never had: the ability to monitor and control connectivity to the cloud while giving users consistent performance for cloud applications.

“Most enterprises use dozens of cloud-based services, whether IT knows about them or not,” said David Hughes, CEO of Silver Peak. “That usage will only increase as enterprises shift computing workloads to the cloud. The problem is, IT staff have no insight into that traffic once it leaves the WAN. They can’t troubleshoot problems or optimize applications the way they would on their own network. CIO’s don’t want to be responsible for performance they can’t control.”

By deploying Silver Peak’s software in data centers, branch offices and cloud interconnection hubs, customers generate the Unity fabric, a network overlay that controls and accelerates connectivity to any combination of enterprise services, IaaS resources and SaaS applications. Each Silver Peak instance on the Unity fabric communicates with the company’s new Cloud Intelligence service, which aggregates ever-changing cloud provider information and minute-to-minute Internet weather. This information is used by Silver Peak to dynamically route traffic to cloud services over the optimal path. Orchestration is handled by Silver Peak’s Global Management System (GMS), which provides IT managers with complete visibility and control over the deployment and use of cloud services.

Unity’s features include advanced WAN routing, cloud intelligence, accelerated encryption, data reduction, path conditioning, traffic shaping and global visibility.

Silver Peak sells through channel partners.

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