Network File System (NFS)

Boost NFS Performance Over Distance with Silver Peak

Access files easily with NFS regardless of office location. Silver Peak corrects the problems that disrupt NFS performance across long distances or congested networks. Copy files to remote servers faster, share files easier. With Silver Peak, NFS transfers across distance improve by as much as eight times.

NFS is a popular distributed file system commonly found in the UNIX/LINUX environment that runs across TCP or UDP. Many companies deploy centralized NFS file servers to lower costs and improve management.

But there can be an additional price to pay; NFS performance degrades significantly across distance. The protocol is particularly chatty, requiring many round-trips for even simple tasks, such as retrieving file attributes. The files retrieved by NFS may be too large for the limited throughput of the long-distance, TCP connection underlying NFS. Remote procedure calls (RPCs) only exacerbate the issue, adding latency and significantly slowing file transfers.

Silver Peak shortens NFS file transfer times and extends bandwidth to improve total cost of ownership. Eliminated are the protocol inefficiencies that slow NFS. File transfers consume less bandwidth whether they run over TCP or UDP. Packet loss, a major factor undermining TCP and NFS performance over distance, is reduced or eliminated in real-time. More specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following challenges:

  • Bandwidth  – Silver Peak’s  byte-level deduplication  removes redundant NFS data from the WAN. Most deduplication algorithms are only implemented for TCP traffic. Silver Peak was the first vendor to implement deduplication for UDP and TCP traffic. The first time NFS 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 NFS to operate more efficiently over distance.  TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Where organizations also share files using CIFS/SMB, they can be benefit from 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.
  • Congestion – Silver Peak makes NFS 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 retransmission. Out-of-order packets are resequenced, avoiding retransmission and processing delays that occur when packets arrive out-of-order.

Silver Peak establishes an Accelerated IPSec virtual private network (VPN) between locations, securing all data with AES-256, the enterprise standard for data encryption. Data-at-rest in 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

  • Increase productivity by accelerating NFS transfers over distance; users get more work accomplished.  
  • Avoid or delay expensive WAN bandwidth upgrades by eliminating significant NFS data from the WAN.
  • Shorten NFS file transfers over distance by correcting underlying networking problems. NFS file transfers are faster, and more NFS traffic is eliminated from the WAN.

Resources

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.