Silver Peak Forecasts: Replication Becomes Mainstream, WAN Bottleneck Persists, Hypervisor-Centric SDN Adoption Begins in 2013

Virtualization and SDN to play an instrumental role in WAN optimization

Singapore. January 2, 2013 – Silver Peak Systems, the leader in accelerating data over distance, today identified the top technology trends to watch out for in 2013, as outlined by founder and CTO David Hughes.

Hypervisor-Centric Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Adoption Begins
In 2013, certain hypervisor-centric network elements (not physical network switching) will be deployed as software in the enterprise because it will be easier to deploy and help lower cost. This will happen with or without any standards around SDN.

Virtualization will exert its influence on the wide area network (WAN) optimization market in 2013. The misconception that virtual does not perform as well as a physical solution has been disproved. It is becoming clear that the market has a strong preference for virtual technology because it offers a more cost-effective solution without any vendor-imposed hardware refresh while allowing for the deployment of WAN optimization anywhere.

Virtualization Drives IT Organization Overlap
More network administrators will be doing what server administrators used to do, while server administrators are expected to start doing things that network administrators do. Functions won’t go away, but there will be increased overlap across the IT organization.

Replication Becomes Mainstream
As data grows, so does the need for replication and the need to replicate everything. Natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy have compelled enterprises to relook into their disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Replication over long distance is no longer optional, it is now required.

WAN Bottleneck Persists
Explosive data growth, combined with storage system performance increases (SSDs), and Web-scale database implementations will make the WAN a continued bottleneck for IT.

The Silver Peak ‘Agility’ initiative leverages SDN to make WAN optimization available on a very granular level in a virtualized environment. By taking WAN optimization from the traditional network-defined domain and applying it directly to the virtual machine domain, it enables virtualization and server managers to address specific application problems more easily and cost effectively.