An independent locally owned Australian manufacturer and distributor of wood-based building products, Gunnersen, has implemented Silver Peak Systems to achieve its disaster recovery (DR) goals.
Despite upgrading network bandwidth from a 4 Mbps to a 10 Mbps connection, its network had remained slow. That meant the company could not meet recovery point objectives (RPO) between its Melbourne head office and its DR center at its Sydney office. It has an MPLS-based WAN that connects its eight branch offices across Australia. Its Auckland office, however, uses VPN to connect to Melbourne.
It was then that information systems manager, Stephen Watson, called in Silver Peak partner, Advantage IT, to find a solution. "Once we were able to gain visibility of what was actually happening on the link, it became very clear what we needed to do," Watson said.
The DR application was using almost all the network capacity and it had to be scaled back to 8 Mbps to free up capacity for other business-critical applications. The Silver Peak Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture software was installed to optimize traffic, at which point packet loss and jitter were removed from the link.
"We were amazed when Silver Peak's solution far exceeded our WAN performance target," added Watson. "It achieved between more than 80% compression on DR, and network traffic dropped from flat-out on 10 Mbps to less than 3 Mbps on average. Actual throughput was greater than 60 Mbps on a 10 Mbps connection."
With increased adoption of virtualized infrastructures and more centralized, cloud-based applications, Silver Peak's WAN optimization solution is positioned to cost-effectively maximize WAN resources and accelerate the adoption of business-critical applications between data centers, branch offices and the cloud.