Silver Peak: Simplifying Enterprise WAN

David Hughes, Founder and CEO
Building a modernized network seems to be inevitable for enterprises to speed up their business expansion and enhance employee productivity and collaboration. As a result, companies are quickly realizing the business benefits and are moving their WAN strategies towards new WAN architectures including, Hybrid WAN, software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Analyzing this burgeoning trend in the network market, Dr. David Hughes, launched Silver Peak in 2004 with a passion and drive to build a better WAN. The high-spirited entrepreneur has been leading the development of the company’s flagship WAN optimization solutions from its early start-up days to become a successful name in the industry by innovating technology, and originally experiencing high growth in new market category. However, Hughes predicted the need for SD-WAN as enterprises migrated applications from the data center to the cloud. This insight has given Silver Peak a humble start in establishing a strategic partnership with Juniper Networks and building Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solutions that offer reliable virtual overlays to connect users to application— independent of carriers, eliminating long procurement, and deployment delays for faster time to service.

The firm’s Unity EdgeConnect solution enables enterprises to radically minimize the cost and intricacies of building a WAN by leveraging broadband, allowing customers to use broadband connections and enhance their current multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks. This solution increases application performance, improves customer responsiveness, and reduces capital and operational expenses of the enterprises across multiple paths in zero time delay. Silver Peaks’ Unity EdgeConnect aids customers to adapt to a broadband WAN at their convenience—be it site-by-site, or via a hybrid WAN approach, leveraging both broadband Internet connectivity (cable, DSL, LTE, etc.) and MPLS.

The solution helps enterprises deliver conventional application performance and qualified service across the WAN, by gaining granular visibility and control to recognize, reliable and fragment applications in placement with the current branch offices’ infrastructure and network services.


Unity EdgeConnect enables customers to move to a broadband WAN at their own level and pace


“With an ever-increasing number of applications delivered as a service via cloud infrastructure, it is important that enterprises be able to move at cloud speed,” explains Hughes. “Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect is the premier solution for customers that want to leverage the internet more effectively in a secure, controlled, and automated manner while delivering consistent and reliable performance for users connecting to any application.”

As a corroboration of such prowess, Silver Peak assisted EarthLink Telecommunications, a broadband Internet Service Provider with their NX appliances to optimize WAN performance and reduce bandwidth costs. Silver Peak leveraged a wide range of real-time network optimization techniques to maximize application performance across the WAN while decreasing IT operational costs. The firm optimized all the applications that ran over IP, including file, email, SQL, web, Voice over IP (VoIP), streaming video, Citrix, Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI), real-time data replication, and remote backup to provide the best Return on Investment (ROI) for WAN acceleration. “Silver Peak has enabled us to double our existing WAN capacity without requiring expensive bandwidth upgrades, which is critical for controlling ongoing operational costs,” says Sarmad Ahmed, GM at EarthLink Telecommunications.

With mega trends like virtualization and cloud computing placing new demands on the data center for WAN capacity and LAN connectivity, Silver Peak intends to expedite the pace of technological changes with its pragmatic WAN optimization product—considered as the next-generation data center.

Company
Silver Peak Systems

Headquarters
Santa Clara, CA

Management
David Hughes, Founder and CEO

Description
Helps enterprises and service providers connect users to applications via costeffective source of connectivity available