Silver Peak aims low(er)

Silver Peak Systems has introduced three new virtual WAN optimisation offerings in a move the Australian boss says will have ‘a material impact on the New Zealand reseller market’.

Wayne Neich, Silver Peak Systems’ regional director Oceania, says the new offerings, particularly the lower-end VX-500 which he dubs ‘the most profound product we have ever released’, will help take WAN optimisation to a broader market, opening up new sales opportunities for resellers.

“It’s hard when you can not sell hardware and make 20 to 30 points on it. We believe there is a real need for the channel to be selling services as well.

“We’re not looking to say anyone should just do WAN optimisation. We believe [resellers and providers] need to make it part of a managed service. That’s the way forward.”

The VX-500, targeted at small remote sites and with an annual license costing US$551, is designed to accelerate smaller networks, with up to two megabits-per-second of throughput and supports up to 8000 simultaneous connections.

The VX-6000 and VX-7000 have also been added to complement Silver Peak’s mid-range products, providing acceleration for 100Mbps and 200Mbps connections, respectively. The products all use Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture software which use real-time acceleration for moving data across the WAN. The offerings run on any standard hypervisor and a variety of hardware platforms such as stand-alone servers, routers, switches, server blades and storage arrays.

“It costs $5000 to implement WAN optimisation using traditional WAN optimisation solutions of hardware and appliances. With the VX-500 we can get that cost right down,” Neich says.

“Trying to produce smaller, cheaper hardware boxes is nuts. We leverage the fact that Dell and other major server manufacturers have already done the box work. You can buy the server, throw a hypervisor on it and then throw on the Silver Peak license,” Neich says.

“Companies don’t have to be big players to benefit from the VX-500. There are lots of medium sized businesses that can benefit. And if you [a reseller] have 20 customers and you’re offering managed services to them and they have 10 sites each, an annual license of $551 is not going to be offensive to them.

“It’s all part of the commoditisation of the market. The victim [of that commoditisation] will be companies relying heavily on low speed WAN optimisation box sales.”