Santa Clara, CA, November 5 , 2007 – Silver Peak Systems , a leading provider of scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration solutions, today announced several new optimization features that overcome packet delivery challenges in high capacity WAN links. Silver Peak’s latest product enhancements address the negative effects of packet loss, out of order packets, and flow restrictions across the WAN, resulting in significantly faster data transfer times and more efficient link utilization.
“We identified serious packet delivery issues on our core WAN routers that were impacting the performance of Oracle replication and other critical traffic,” said Leon Roberge, Director of Information Systems at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. “Silver Peak’s NX appliances gave us the tools necessary to address these issues until we could correct the problem. They got us through a tough period, all the while ensuring that our disaster recovery plans were never compromised.”
The Biggest Loser
As data volumes increase, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with backup and replication cycles across the WAN. Enterprises require higher bandwidth WAN connections to support these growing demands and are turning to shared WAN technologies like MPLS and IP VPNs as a cost effective way of establishing this connectivity.
In MPLS and IP VPN environments, packet delivery issues can increase as throughput increases, which places more demand on network resources. It is common to see averages of 0.5 percent packet loss with peaks reaching 5 percent. These problems can lead to excessive re-transmissions, which limits the effective throughput of data transfers across the WAN.
“Packet loss and reordering can debilitate key applications across the WAN, especially in data replication and remote backup scenarios where there are large amounts of sustained traffic,” said Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates. “By overcoming these packet delivery issues in real-time, Silver Peak provides enormous value in these environments. As more enterprises move to MPLS and IP VPNs, loss mitigation and reordering techniques will become an increasingly important requirement for WAN optimization devices.”
Cutting Losses
Silver Peak is best known for its Network Memory™ technology, the industry’s most scalable solution for data reduction. By eliminating the transfer of repetitive information across the WAN, Network Memory can improve WAN utilization by over 95 percent. When used in conjunction with Silver Peak’s other optimization techniques, enterprises can also reduce transfer times across the WAN by as much as 100 times. Techniques within the Silver Peak solution that overcome packet loss and ordering (and improve visibility into these issues) include:
- Dynamic Forward Error Correction (FEC) . FEC packets are used to reconstitute lost packets at the far end of a WAN link in real-time, eliminating the need to retransmit lost data. Silver Peak appliances constantly measure packet loss on the WAN and compensate accordingly. Silver Peak offers the only loss mitigation solution that works on all enterprise traffic, including TCP, UDP, and proprietary transport protocols (such as some Fibre Channel over IP implementations). It is also the highest capacity loss mitigation solution on the market, capable of improving loss on WAN links up to 500 Mbps in size.
- Packet Order Correction (POC). Silver Peak NX appliances re-sequence packets on the far end of a WAN link “on the fly” to avoid re-transmissions that occur when packets arrive out of order. By performing the functionality in a dedicated WAN optimization device (as opposed to an end station or router), enterprises have the scalability needed to handle high volume, high throughput data streams with minimal added latency. POC is performed in real-time and across all IP flows (regardless of transport protocol).
• Packet striping. Silver Peak’s NX appliances enable packets to be spread across multiple IP flows to overcome single flow limits in network elements, such as routers and firewalls. By taking a single flow and making it look like many flows, Silver Peak ensures maximum throughput for high bandwidth applications.
• Network and Traffic statistics. Silver Peak’s Global Management System (GMS) provides detailed statistics on bandwidth, latency, loss and out of order packets across the WAN (historical and real-time). Advanced reporting tools assist with WAN analysis and in the enforcement of service provider Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
For more information
A detailed technology brief on the effects of lost and out of order packets, written by Jim Metzler, can be found at www.silver-peak.com/improve_packet_delivery . This document also contains real-world examples of how enterprises have overcome packet delivery challenges, resulting in improved RPO/RTO.
More information on Silver Peak’s WAN acceleration technology, including details on the company’s FEC and POC implementation, can be found at www.silver-peak.com/technology.
About Silver Peak Systems, Inc.
Silver Peak improves backup, replication and recovery between data centers and facilitates branch office server and storage centralization by improving application performance across the Wide Area Network (WAN). The company’s award winning NX appliances deliver exceptional performance improvements with unprecedented security and scalability across all enterprise applications, including data replication, backup, file transfers, email, web and real-time applications such as Citrix and VoIP. For more information, visit http://www.silver-peak.com/infocenter
Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, Network Memory and Silver Peak NX Series are trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc.