Silver Peak Adds Partner for Data Center WAN Optimization

By David Gross

Privately-held Silver Peak has been among the most quiet of the layer 4-7 acceleration vendors lately.   But Friday, the company spoke up and announced it had a new partner in Japan, Netmarks, for distributing its equipment in the Asian country.

Silver Peak has been looking for a niche to fill, and competing against publicly-traded companies like  Riverbed (RVBD), Blue Coat (BCSI), Cisco (CSCO), and Juniper (JNPR), its message often gets lost in the all noise.   The company, originally known as Cheyenne Networks, was founded in 2004, not long after Riverbed was, but also not long before Riverbed' started to surpass Packeteer, before that company's takeover by Blue Coat.

The company has raised over $60 million since its founding in 2004, $4 million of which came earlier this month.   Its investors include Greylock, Benchmark Capital and Pinnacle Ventures.  

While Riverbed and others have put a lot of effort into mobile apps, Silver Peak has re-focused itself on the data center.   This is really more of a marketing decision than one of technical specs, because there is a lot of common technology across these plaforms, from http pre-fetch to CIFS accleration, and WAN latency has far more to do with the physical medium - fiber, satellite, etc - than whether the network end point is a data center or corporate office building.    Nonethless, concentrating sales and marketing in one area is a sensible strategy for Silver Peak with so many larger competitors in the market.

Yahoo's New Upstate NY Data Center Set to Open In September

Yahoo's (YHOO) new data center, located 20 miles north of Buffalo in Lockport, NY, is set to open this fall. The facility is part of Yahoo's save-the-world environmental strategy, which includes cutting its carbon intensity by 40%. And where better to do that in Western New York, which has a cool climate and inexpensive hydro power, not unlike the Pacific Northwest where Yahoo and other large Internet firms have built stand-alone centers. Yahoo claims its newest data center will have a PUE of 1.08.

This Yahoo center reinforces the trend of stand-alones locating near cheap power, while public data centers remain near abundant fiber optics. It's not unlike the trend that emerged 30-35 years ago with corporate office parks, where many of the single tenant facilities were built in suburbs to be near employees, while multi-tenant buildings stayed closer to downtown to be near transit lines, financial exchanges, or government buildings.

One factor sustaining this trend with data centers is continued advancement in WAN Acceleration technologies to haul traffic out of these facilities. WAN Acceleration used to be focused primarily on TCP windows and HTTP, but new services like Internap's (INAP) XIP, have targeted BGP-caused delays as well. In addition to new public services, stand-alone owners like Google (GOOG) have been drawing on advances in managing long-haul bandwidth from research networks like Intenet2 and ESnet.

In addition to benefiting from new cooling and bandwidth management technologies, this facility will be one of the first large stand-alones in upstate New York. With that region having many of the same climate and renewable energy benefits of Washington and Oregon, it could attract similar stand-alone facilities over the next five years, just as the Pacific Northwest has over the last five.