Silver Peak has launched what it claimed is the biggest WAN accelerator ever — a box able to optimize, de-duplicate, compress, and encrypt 1Gbps of WAN traffic.

Called the NX-9000, it's also the first accelerator with 10Gbps WAN interfaces "to scale for the future," said Silver Peak marketing director Jeff Aaron. It supports up to 4Gbps of bidirectional LAN-side traffic and 1Gbps of bidirectional WAN traffic, he added.

That's several times faster than the published capacity of competitors, such as Riverbed and Juniper. They can handle several hundred Mbps when several devices stacked together, or if some acceleration features are turned off. Cisco's WAE 7371 can handle a 1Gbits/s WAN but has less than half the LAN-side capacity of the NX-9000.

Aaron said that the new boxes are aimed at applications such as datacenter replication, over-the-WAN backup, and the like. That's different from the branch office focus of most other WAN optimizers, he claimed.

"The main differences between datacenter and branch needs are that datacenter devices are more often deployed out of band, not in-line," he explained. "It means they're a little more complicated to deploy, where branch boxes can be plug and play.

"The datacenter means more traffic as well, so there's throughput issues, so it needs more disk capacity. The traffic profile is different too, with fewer user applications and more host-to-host applications."

He said the NX-9000 uses the same optimization technology as Silver Peak's earlier systems, but achieves greater throughput by running on far more powerful hardware. Each appliance has dual Xeon quad-core processors, and like the 500Mbit/s NX-8000, which formerly topped the range, it has 8TB of local RAID storage for data de-duplication.

However, a rival supplier questioned Silver Peak's reliance on Intel silicon, and warned that the device could simply shift the bottleneck to the LAN side.

"I am extremely cynical on their ability to handle that traffic without using network processors," said Simon Jackson, Packeteer's director of systems engineering for Europe, adding that Packeteer (which was recently bought by Blue Coat), uses network processors in its 6Gbps PacketShaper Turbo flow-shaper.

Several others also use these specialist multi-core chips to offload high-throughput tasks, including Cisco.

Jackson continued: "If it's saturating a Gigabit on the WAN, it's significant - but that could need 20 Gbit/s of real feed."

Jeff Aaron countered that although the NX-9000's LAN-side capacity is just 4Gbps, "Scalability is more than just bandwidth — it's also the number of offices and users you can support."

It can optimize up to 256,000 simultaneous flows, meaning it can support many more sessions than its rivals, he said. At perhaps 10 sessions per user, a single NX-9000 in the datacenter connected to a Gig pipe could support thousands of users working in hundreds of remote offices, he suggested.

The new device is not cheap, however — it lists for US$259,995, which is double the price of the NX-8000.

Microsoft made available for download Tuesday the latest beta of its virtualization add-on for Windows Server 2008.

The company said Hyper-V RC1 (Release Candidate 1) is feature complete, but it did add on additional Windows guest operating system support and integration features.

A Release Candidate signifies the software is out for final beta testing before final release. The previous RC, RC0, was released two months ago.

"This is the last planned Hyper-V milestone before RTM," says Jeff Woolsey, senior program manager for Windows Server virtualization. RTM stands for Release to Manufacturing, which signifies the software development process is complete.

Microsoft said in April that it was ahead of schedule on the new timetable for release of Hyper-V and that the technology would likely show up in June or July.

The company has said since the May 2007 decision to cut Hyper-V from Windows Server 2008 that the virtualization technology would ship within 180 days of the release of the server, which was Feb. 28.

"We are feeling pretty good that it won't be up to the full 180 days," said Dai Vu, director of virtualization products and solutions in Microsoft's server and tools division, at Microsoft's Management Summit in April.

Microsoft also confirmed that its MSDN and TechNet Web sites have been running in production on Hyper-V for several weeks.

The RC1 code of Hyper-V adds support for Windows 2000 Server SP4 and Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4. Both of those configurations are one-way and support emulation mode only.

Hyper-V  supports a number of guest operating systems: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86).

In addition, RC1 simplifies the process for installing integration components for Windows Server 2008 guest systems. Integration components are sets of drivers and services that help ensure virtual machines have a more consistent state and perform better.

Microsoft also said it is releasing mouse integration support for SUSE 10 in conjunction with RC1.

The RC1 upgrade is optional for current testers given that it is not compatible with the current beta of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008, the Microsoft tools for managing virtual environments. Microsoft says it will release an upgrade of the VMM 2008 beta to support RC1.

In addition, users running earlier betas of Hyper-V on x64 versions of Windows Server 2008 can get RC1 via Windows Update beginning May 27.

The final release of VMM is slated to ship 30 to 60 days after Hyper-V hits its RTM stage.

When Hyper-V ships, Microsoft will be providing users a third hypervisor option to go along with those already available from VMware and Xen-based derivatives marketed by Citrix,Oracle, Red Hat and Novell.

Hypervisor technology is a base technology layer that acts as the virtualization foundation for guest operating systems.