Silver Peak Systems, the leader in accelerating data over distance, today announced that its virtual marketplace has exceeded 20,000 downloads, highlighting continued demand for software-based solutions that simplify and lower the costs for accelerating wide area networks (WANs). A recent study conducted by Silver Peak also found that, when given the choice between physical or virtual WAN acceleration in the branch office, the vast majority of IT professionals surveyed (81.6%) indicated they prefer virtual.

The Silver Peak virtual marketplace was first introduced a year ago and is the first-of-its-kind in the WAN optimization market. It provides anyone with instant access to free, self-service trials of Silver Peak’s broad portfolio of virtual solutions. The Silver Peak software solutions deliver multi-gigabit performance and run on all standard hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and KVM.

“It’s becoming more evident that the market has a strong preference for virtual WAN acceleration technology,” said Rick Tinsley, president and CEO of Silver Peak. “Virtual is a win-win in terms of making it easier for customers to access and deploy WAN optimization technology, and with advancements in hypervisor technology, performance levels are now as good as or better than hardware. This translates into costs savings and allows customers to avoid the expensive and all-too-frequent vendor-imposed hardware refresh.”

In a recent product review conducted by the InfoWorld Test Center, Silver Peak was proven to pack “superior WAN optimization into a virtual machine.” The review concluded that “regardless of the link speed and latency, the [Silver Peak] VX optimized WAN traffic as well as or better than a comparable physical chassis” from Riverbed.

Customer testimonials:

“The Silver Peak virtual products give us unmatched performance, pricing and deployment flexibility for optimizing our data centers and distributed network of stores,” said Justin Jongbloedt, senior manager of network and Microsoft services for Gander Mountain, which operates the nation’s largest retail network of stores for hunting, fishing, camping, and marine products.

“We were able to quickly download, implement and test the Silver Peak software without requiring any assistance from Silver Peak. We enjoyed the benefit of seeing actual optimization results within the virtual environment, without making any upfront commitments,” said Charlie Pope, IT manager for Coastal Beverage Company based in Wilmington, North Carolina.

“Ease of deployment really made Silver Peak stand out from Riverbed and the competition,” said Travis Rupp, associate vice president of project management in IT for Denali Alaskan Federal Credit Union.

“The [Silver Peak] software solution was a major plus point as compared with other optimizers on the market, which tend to be hardware-based. As a result, deployment was simple, flexible and scalable across locations without any dependency on hardware requirements,” said Niwat Lertnamvongwan, group IT director at dwp (Design World Partnership).

About Silver Peak Systems

Silver Peak software accelerates data between data centers, branch offices and the cloud. The company’s software-defined acceleration solves network quality, capacity and distance challenges to provide fast and reliable access to data anywhere in the world. Leveraging its leadership in data center class wide area network (WAN) optimization, Silver Peak is a key enabler for strategic IT projects like virtualization, big data and disaster recovery. Download Silver Peak software today at www.silver-peak.com/marketplace.

Note: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, and Silver Peak VXOA are all trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.