What happens when storage demand is growing at close to 80% and apps must be rolled out and available globally while consolidation is taking place across servers and data centers and branch-office infrastructure and virtualization is believed to be the cure for all ills?According to Silver Peak VP of worldwide marketing Craig Stouffer, many companies are looking at significant downtime to rectify all those issues -- not exactly an appealing option in these days of 24/7 business. So in the belief that there needs to be a better way, Silver Peak is pushing WAN acceleration as the best way to manage those challenges.

Stouffer says Silver Peak is taking the tack of focusing heavily on not just WAN acceleration but on the broader concept of data movement as an approach to alleviate "the very specific pain point" of a company's network being down for 36 hours or so. This marks another instance of vendors trying to develop innovative solutions that go beyond just WAN acceleration as storage demand, globalization, consolidation, and virtualization combine to present IT leaders with a dizzying array of technology and business-process challenges.