Image: Silver Peak
Silver Peak Systems, a WAN optimization and acceleration software provider, announced on Monday a new release of its Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA). Release 6.0 delivers performance improvements to all Silver Peak physical and virtual products, according to the company, and specifically includes support for Jumbo Frame acceleration to replicate data and workload optimization for Citrix XenCenter as well as gigabit Ethernet support for multiple hypervisors.
With the new release 6.0, Silver Peak offers over 10 gigabit per second speeds with its WAN acceleration software and includes expanded support for hypervisor performance. The release supports all common hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and KVM (Kernel-Based Virtual Machine).
Jumbo Frames (TCP frames up to 9,000 bytes) are commonly configured for high-performance data transfer and replication between two sites. Without Jumbo Frames, the maximum transfer unit of data are usually encapsulated in 1,500-byte packets.
According to company officials, Silver Peak tested its Velocity software on NetApp SnapMirror, Dell Inc.'s Compellent, and Dell EqualLogic and customers can expect to achieve 20 times faster-than-average average off-site replication. Silver Peak hopes to extend direct support for storage products from EMC Corp. and Hitachi Data Systems early next year.
Silver Peak recognized that its users are often not dedicated network administrators. So they simplified WAN acceleration deployment models. The new VXOA release includes an Agility Plug-In for Citrix XenCenter, which aims to put data acceleration in the hands of virtualization administrators who manage Citrix XenCenter. Note that in August the company provided the same plug-in control for VMware vCenter virtualization administrators.
With VXOA 6.0, law firms and legal IT support can use Silver Peak virtual machines in the Amazon cloud to accelerate data transfer between data centers and branch offices using acceleration software to and from Amazon Web Services.
The Global Management System is Silver Peak's centralized software to monitor and manage WAN optimization outside of its plug-in architecture for storage systems. With VXOA 6.0, GMS is now based on HTML5, which delivers an intuitive, drag-and-drop WAN acceleration management interface to most devices, including smartphones and tablet computers. The central management software supports dashboards that can refit to any size screen, which report over 100 data points including real-time information such as bandwidth utilization and device status.
Silver Peak VXOA 6.0 is available today direct from Silver Peak as well as its global network of channel partners. All of Silver Peak's software products are available for free self-service trials at Silver Peak's marketplace.
Attorney Sean Doherty is LTN's technology editor.
