Caching emerged in the 1990’s as a potential way of accelerating the performance of specific applications, such as web applications, while reducing overall WAN traffic. While caching achieved reasonable success for a few short years, the market for these point products ultimately subsided as a result of several operational and functional limitations.
The Silver Peak solution addresses many of the fundamental deficiencies associated with web caching, which include:
Application Transparency
Silver Peak works at the network-layer of the ISO stack. In contrast, web caches operate at the application level, intercepting client requests and server responses and storing application specific objects. As a result, Silver Peak is able to provide performance improvements across all enterprise applications, regardless of the transport mechanism (TCP, UDP, etc).
Matching traffic patterns vs. application-level objects.
Network Memory recognizes traffic byte streams, observing pattern matches as opposed to object references. In this way, Network Memory can detect when the same information is sent using different applications, and detect when modifications are made to existing data. This enables Silver Peak to better utilize WAN bandwidth and provide better application performance than caches.
Support for dynamic content.
Web caches are dependent on having cache tags set properly on web objects. Unfortunately, most web application developers do not take the time to set these tags. As a result, web caches treat most objects as being non-cacheable, reducing cache efficiency. Silver Peak does not require any pre-defined tags to detect repetitive data.
Seamless Integration.
Network Memory does not alter the communication mechanism between clients and servers. All requests for information from a server are delivered to the application server itself. Furthermore, the server’s exact response, not an old cached version, is delivered to the user. This means that Silver Peak appliances can be seamlessly inserted between existing clients and servers with no special application-layer configuration.
Data coherency.
Network Memory preserves communication mechanisms between clients and servers. By examining all traffic in real-time, NX Series appliances are always dealing with up-to-date information, eliminating the possibility of stale content delivery. All application locking semantics and file/record locking capabilities are still performed by the native server, not a proxy device, ensuring 100% data coherency.
Security, compliance, and management.
In a Silver Peak environment, access control policy mechanisms are centrally maintained within the servers themselves, eliminating potential security risks and avoiding unnecessary management headaches that come with replicating and maintaining access privileges across multiple devices. Wirespeed AES encryption ensures that any information stored on NX Series appliances (or passed between them via IPsec) is completely secure from unauthorized access.
