Microsoft Lync

Collaborate using Microsoft Lync more effectively across the Internet and wide area networks (WANs). Silver Peak eliminates the network problems that can undermine Lync quality and availability over distance. Calls become clearer and video is more responsive. With Silver Peak,  you can deliver a more responsive, more consistent Lync experience to users in any remote office.

Microsoft Lync is a powerful unified communications platform integrating voice, video, screen sharing and more. While effective within an office, the Lync  experience may deteriorate across long distances. Files take longer to transfer. Voice calls become harder to understand. Video calls fail to start or become more pixelated. 

Adding more WAN bandwidth will not solve the problem.  As a real-time application, VoIP and video are  highly sensitive to jitter, latency, and packet loss all commonly found on the Internet. A good quality VoIP call will compensate for no more than 30ms of jitter, yet jitter rates on congested networks, such as the Internet, can average 120 msec. Packet loss rates should be kept under 1 percent, but again across Internet-based virtual private networks (VPNs) packet loss rates average one percent and are often much higher. And while a VoIP call can operate in as a little as 31 Kbps (G.729), the bandwidth may be consumed by the other applications sharing the network. 

Silver Peak addresses those and other network challenges, improving the availability and the quality of Microsoft Lync. Packet loss and out-of-order packets can be minimized or eliminated and Silver Peak can select the best path for Lync across the WAN with the least packet loss. More specifically, Silver Peak address the following networking problems impacting Lync:

• Congestion – Silver Peak minimizes or eliminates the effects of network congestion, making VoIP calls consistently clearer and more predictable across congested WANs. Silver Peak’s Forward Error Correction (FEC) eliminated as much as 90 percent of packet loss in independent testing by regenerating packets in real-time at the far end of a WAN link. Packet Order Correction (POC) resequences packets in real-time, avoiding retransmission and processing delays from out-of-order packets. Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic shaping guarantee VoIP receives the necessary bandwidth on congested networks.  The culmination of those capabilities has been shown to practically eliminate 120 msec of jitter from a connection.  
• Bandwidth – Silver Peak  byte-level deduplication  eliminates redundant data across the WAN, making more bandwidth available for Microsoft Lync calls. The first time an application 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, improving the collaboration tools in Microsoft Lync with TCP Acceleration, which includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Sharing or accessing files with the Common Internet File System (CIFS) is made faster with CIFS Acceleration, which 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.

Silver Peak protects the files and data used during a video conferencing collaboration 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. You can download and deploy it  as a free, self-service trial in just 20 minutes or contact us to see how Silver Peak can help your organization.