Silver Peak: SD-WAN with Packet-by-Packet Load Balancing and Error Correction

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Silver Peak is one of many vendors in the burgeoning software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) market. Superficially, it shares the same value proposition as all the players in this space, as it gives customers the ability to configure, prioritize, and manage wide-area network connections among geographically distributed locations, and between those locations and cloud services.

Silver Peak’s most important differentiator, however, is its ability to make load balancing decisions on a packet-by-packet basis. While other SD-WAN vendors prioritize traffic by type or by message, for example, send video over the Internet but point-of-sale transactions over the private MPLS link, Silver Peak can break up individual messages and route them piecemeal for the best real-time performance.

Furthermore, the vendor offers error correction it bases on ‘erasure coding,’ which uses a checksum-based approach for reconstructing lost packets, similar to the way that RAID storage systems work.

The end result: virtually no lost packets, and overall real-time performance that can actually exceed the performance of each of the individual network connections, even when all of the network connections are simultaneously experiencing slowdowns or other issues.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

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