Accoona Looks to Silver Peak to Accelerate Internet Searching

NX Appliances Revolutionize Web Experience through Fast, Scalable Access to Sophisticated Search Tools

Santa Clara , CA, February 20 , 2007 – Silver Peak Systems Inc. ( www.silver-peak.com ), a leading provider of scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration solutions, today announced that Accoona Corp., a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence search technology, has selected Silver Peak NX appliances to accelerate the performance of the company’s Internet search engine.  With Silver Peak’s innovative Network Memory™ technology, Accoona has reduced the amount of traffic sent to its data centers, while overcoming many of the performance challenges associated with communicating to users throughout the world across the public Internet.  The result is enhanced access to the World Wide Web via Accona’s searching capabilities.

“We compared several vendors side by side to see who could provide the most benefit to HTTP traffic in a high latency, high loss environment,” said Daniel Doman, Chief Operating Officer of Accoona.  “In the end, Silver Peak stood out from the crowd.  They demonstrated an incredible 99% data reduction, and offered the best architecture for supporting tens of thousands of simultaneous users at Gigabit per second WAN speeds.”

The Search is Over
The Accoona Search Engine, originally launched in 2004 in the United States and China, and supported by artificial intelligence technologies and search refining functionality, is designed to deliver highly relevant search results and enhance the web searching experience.  This includes access to Accoona’s news and business information databases and contextual keyword search capabilities for fast and reliable information retrieval.  Accoona holds a 20-year exclusive agreement with the China Daily Information Company as the official search provider for ChinaDaily, one of the country's largest portals.

Accoona recognized the need for a WAN acceleration solution that could improve the performance of HTTP traffic between their distributed Points of Presence (POP) and centralized data centers.  These links range in speed from 45 Mbps to 1 Gbps, and are designed to support tens of thousands of simultaneous user connections (i.e. TCP flows).

“Out of the gate, our requirements knocked some vendors out of the running.  Other vendors had difficulty scaling to meet the bandwidth requirements, requiring dozens of boxes and load balancers for a single office,” said Doman. “Silver Peak is the only vendor that could truly satisfy Accoona’s scalability needs, enabling the company to expand its presence throughout the United States, Europe, and China in a cost effective manner.”

Accoona also looked at WAN acceleration appliances as a way of overcoming the negative effects that latency and loss have on application performance across the public Internet.  To address these challenges, the company’s IT department tested WAN acceleration solutions on a cross country link with 150 ms of latency and 5% packet loss.  Silver Peak excelled under these extreme conditions, reducing the amount of data on the WAN by 99.2%.  10 GB of data was reduced to only 80 MB, a 130:1 ratio.  These results were achieved using Network Memory™, Silver Peak’s patent-pending solution for disk based data reduction.  In addition, Silver Peak’s NX appliances use Forward Error Correction (FEC) to mitigate loss and TCP acceleration to overcome latency.  In the Accoona environment, for example, FEC reduced average packet loss by over 50%, overcoming the ill effects of network congestion.

 “Scalability, security, and performance all play a key role when delivering services in multiple countries via the public Internet,” said Rick Tinsley, CEO at Silver Peak.  “As our success with Accoona demonstrates, Silver Peak has unique competitive advantages on all of these fronts.  We are pleased to be working with a pioneer in the space of Internet searching to improve the web experience by bringing information closer to individuals across the world.”

 
About Accoona
Founded in February 2004, Accoona Corp. is an industry pioneer in Artificial Intelligence search technology.  The company launched the Accoona search engine in December 2004, with the official consumer launch in mid 2005. Internationally, Accoona holds a 20-year exclusive agreement with the China Daily Information Company as the official search provider for ChinaDaily.com.cn, one of the country's largest portals.

About Silver Peak Systems, Inc .
Silver Peak facilitates the centralization of servers and storage by improving application performance across a Wide Area Network (WAN). With the company’s award winning NX family of WAN acceleration appliances, enterprises can improve disaster recovery in data centers and reduce “server sprawl” in branch and remote offices. Silver Peak delivers exceptional, transparent performance improvements for all enterprise applications, including data replication, backup, file transfers, email, web, and real-time applications such as Citrix and VoIP. For more information, visit http://www.silver-peak.com/infocenter

NOTE: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, Network Memory and Silver Peak NX Series are trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc.