Don’t let distance disrupt your Windows applications. Silver Peak software accelerates CIFS/SMB, the protocol underlying Windows file sharing. Files open 90 percent faster and consume 50-times less bandwidth. Servers can be centralized and files shared without impacting the user’s quality of experience. With Silver Peak, enterprise networks are made more efficient and cost-effective, no matter how far users are from their servers.
CIFS/SMB was originally introduced by IBM in the 1980s and popularized by Microsoft as the core file sharing mechanism for the Windows operating system. Today, the protocol can also be found in numerous environments. CIFS/SMB has been through several releases with the most current version, SMB 3.0, available in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
While effective within the office, CIFS/SMB performance degrades across distance. Early versions of the protocol were particularly “chatty,” requiring several client-server exchanges to complete a single operation. As such, CIFS/SMB was highly susceptible to latency and network congestion problems, which are particularly common to large scale, shared networks such as the Internet. In addition, the files shared with CIFS/SMB often consume a significant amount of bandwidth. Later versions of CIFS/SMB include significant performance improvements, but continue to struggle across distance.
Silver Peak addresses the major performance challenges of running any version of CIFS/SMB across the WAN for small or large organizations without additional hardware, plug-ins, or tweaking of the Silver Peak software:
- Bandwidth – Silver Peak byte-level deduplication removes redundant CIFS/SMB data from the WAN. The first time data is sent from the WAN, it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests are fulfilled from the local Silver Peak instance.
- Latency – Silver Peak mitigates latency enabling CIFS/SMB to operate more efficiently over distance. CIFS Acceleration includes CIFS read-ahead, CIFS write-behind, and CIFS metadata optimizations TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Latency is also reduced through packet coalescing, which re-packages multiple smaller packets into a single larger one, and Dynamic Path Control, which selects the fastest path to a remote location.
- Congestion – Silver Peak eliminates the effects of congestion, making CIFS/SMB performance more predictable by recovering lost packets and resequencing out-of-order packets in real-time, avoiding retransmission delays. Dynamic Path Control identifies the optimum path to a remote location. Traffic shaping and QoS mechanisms ensure CIFS/SMB receives the necessary bandwidth.
Silver Peak also protects CIFS/SMB data in transit with Accelerated IPSec, the fastest way to secure traffic site-to-site. All of this is done to scale, improving application performance from small offices to large data centers, making Silver Peak software the most scalable data acceleration platform in the industry.
Featured Products
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VX Virtual WAN Optimization Software
Silver Peak VX WAN optimization software supports the full list of Silver Peak WAN optimization features. Use Silver Peak VX software to build a Silver Peak Unity WAN fabric for integrating your enterprise WAN, the Internet and the cloud, and to optimize every SaaS application.
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NX Appliances for Application Acceleration and Replication Acceleration
Silver Peak NX WAN optimization appliances are the industry's highest-performance WAN optimization solutions, delivering three-times the WAN performance and capacity of the nearest competing products. Silver Peak Software for Life program means you can convert NX appliances to VX software at anytime for free.
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Unity Architecture: Building an SD-WAN Fabric
Silver Peak Unity is the premier solution for broadband and hybrid WANs.
Benefits
- Improve collaboration by allowing distributed teams to share files faster and collaborate more effectively.
- Be more productive by completing file operations faster, saving organization hours each week.
- Lower costs by consolidating servers into the data center without impacting the user experience.
- Lower bandwidth charges by eliminating redundant data from the WAN.
Resources
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This brief explains the performance challenges over distance faced by Common Internet Filing System / Server Message Block (CIFS/SMB), the file sharing protocol used by Microsoft Windows. Included are performance results from customer deployment and details as to how Silver Peak data acceleration solves those challenges.
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Users in branch offices and remote offices have traditionally had a difficult time accessing files stored in remote data centers. The Windows file system relies on CIFS/SMB a chatty protocol that performs poorly over the WAN. Silver Peak corrects CIFS chattiness, accelerating the transfer of data to the branch office or remote office. This document explains how Silver Peak enable centrally managed file services to dramatically improve branch office and remote office productivity.
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This is a demonstration of Silver Peak VX virtual WAN optimization software accelerating remote file transfers (CIFS) between a data center and a remote branch office.
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Users in branch offices and remote offices have traditionally had a difficult time accessing files stored in remote data centers. The Windows file system relies on CIFS/SMB a chatty protocol that performs poorly over the WAN. Silver Peak corrects CIFS chattiness, accelerating the transfer of data to the branch office or remote office. This document explains how Silver Peak enable centrally managed file services to dramatically improve branch office and remote office productivity.
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