In all, Silver Peak's products proved easier to use with a wider range of applications, Swan says. Silver Peak takes an "application-agnostic approach" in its NX Series appliances, meaning that acceleration takes place at the IP layer. So, for example, Silver Peak can provide deduplication for streaming video, even though it runs on User Datagram Protocol rather than TCP, says Jeff Aaron, Silver Peak's director of product marketing. Considering the NVSD's strong interest in video, this capability made Silver Peak the way to go, Swan says.
The district plans to use 39 Silver Peak WAN-acceleration devices: two NX-7500s, one at the school-board office and one at the data-replication site; and an NX-3500s at each of the district's 37 schools. The district can't disclose the project budget, but notes that the cost was "significantly less" than a bandwidth expansion would have been, Lamb says. Should the district eventually add bandwidth, Silver Peak's WAN accelerators would further improve performance, he says.
Tested performance improvements
Application performance improved immediately after installation, the IT executives say. The district used a script file to open, save and close documents across a LAN, and compared those results with the average times of three tests that were run across the accelerated WAN. Tests on a LAN showed that a 2MB DOC file took about 5.33 seconds to save compared with an average time of 2.06 seconds on the WAN. Out of 18 tested files, only five performed slower than LAN speeds across the accelerated WAN.
"Overall, it's offsetting close to three-quarters of traffic off the network. We're effectively getting four times the size of the pipes that we have," Swan says, adding that such services as BCeSIS, which had been experiencing connection saturation, have been running faster.
Though the NVSD is almost finished with the installation, it is too early to say whether the district has seen a return on its financial investment, Lamb says. However, he emphasizes that looking at results from an expense perspective belies the district's mission. "We see student achievement as our return on investment, not increasing profit," he says. "We're really looking at anywhere on campus having access . . . and hopefully that transfers into greater student success."
Green, a Chicago-based freelance writer, can be reached at kent.green@gmail.com.