Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP)

Accelerate Data Movement over FCIP with Silver Peak WAN Optimization

Don’t let the network disrupt your distributed SAN. Silver Peak optimizes FCIP operations over distance. Connect to remote SANs for faster remote disk access and reduce the time needed to mirror data. Silver Peak can eliminate as much as 90 percent of FCIP traffic from the WAN, enabling distributed SANs to perform as well as SANs within the data center.

New IP storage networking applications, such as storage virtualization, enable IT managers to create virtual storage pools among geographically dispersed SAN resources to better manage these environments. But, when the WAN slows down the movement data among distributed SANs, the effective utilization of storage resources and storage applications such as backup and disaster recovery suffer. For block-level data stored in a SAN, Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) can help, but only if the latency and bandwidth usag are minimized.

Silver Peak increases the capabilities and performance of storage data transmissions - while leveraging investments in existing WAN links and datacenter technologies. Silver Peak optimizes storage data performance within FCIP tunnels by overcoming WAN obstacles such as bandwidth, distance, and network quality. More specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following performance challenges:

  • Bandwidth – Silver Peak byte-level deduplication removes redundant FCIP data from the WAN. The first time FCIP sends data it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests are fulfilled by the local Silver Peak instance.  
  • Latency – Silver Peak mitigates latency enabling FCIP to operate more efficiently over distance.  TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP.  CIFS Acceleration  includes CIFS read-ahead, CIFS write-behind, and CIFS metadata optimizations. Latency is also reduced through packet coalescing, which re-packages multiple smaller packets into a single larger one, and through Dynamic Path Control, which selects the fastest path to a remote location.
  • Congestion – Silver Peak makes FCIP performance more predictable across congested WANs. Lost packets are reconstituted in real-time at the far end of a WAN link, avoiding delays that come with multiple round-trip retransmissions. Out-of-order packets are resequenced, avoiding retransmission and processing delays that occur when packets arrive out-of-order.

Silver Peak protects FCIP data in-flight between locations with an Accelerated IPSec virtual private network (VPN) running AES-256, the enterprise standard for data encryption. Data-at-rest within Silver Peak instances is also encrypted with AES. End-to-end encryption is provided by SSL/TLS.

Silver Peak offers the most scalable and cost-effective data acceleration software for connecting data centers, remote offices and the cloud. Download and deploy it  yourself in just 20 minutes or contact us to see how Silver Peak can help your team.

Featured Products

  • VX WAN Optimization Software

    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.

  • NX WAN Optimization Appliances

    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.

Benefits

  • Avoid or delay expensive WAN bandwidth upgradesby eliminating redundant FCIP traffic from the WAN.
  • Extend SAN deployments by ensuring FCIP traffic is delivered fast and reliably by eliminating excessive overhead from FCIP tunnels and accelerating traffic.
  • Shorten FCIP data transfers, Disaster Recovery and backup over distance by correcting underlying networking problems and eliminating excess FCIP traffic from the WAN.

Resources

  • Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. turned to Silver Peak Systems Inc. wide area network (WAN) optimization appliances when it needed help moving large engineering files coast to coast for disaster recovery, choosing the startup over larger and better known competitors. Toshiba America's director of information systems, Leon Roberge, said Silver Peak's NX WAN acceleration devices outperformed Riverbed Technology Inc. in his evaluation, which surprised him considering Riverbed's reputation. 
  • Citizens Business Bank's Steve Borba talked about needing to fulfill a disaster recovery initiative and how Silver Peak WAN optimization software was the logical choice for the bank's Dell and VMware infrastructure.
  • The Guarantor’s mission is to make loans more accessible, manageable and successful for students, schools and lenders. That means working with the Federal government’s Department of Education (DOE) to further the country’s education access goals, providing lenders with the resources they need to build their student loan business, serving college financial aid offices with comprehensive tools and expertise, and helping borrowers successfully apply for, manage, and repay their student loans.
  • All too often, the Wide Area Network (WAN) link is the weak link in data protection. Limited bandwidth, high latency, lost packets, and out-of-order packets can all jeopardize strategic data replication and backup initiatives, resulting in missed Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives (RPO/RTO).