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When performing remote backup across the WAN, a large amount of data must be transferred in a short amount of time. This can be difficult to achieve when bandwidth is scarce or a significant amount of latency exists between locations. As poor WAN performance can prevent backups from successfully completing within well defined windows, Silver Peak is a perfect complement to CommVault's Galaxy remote backup software.
Enterprises can improve the performance of remote backups by deploying CommVault in conjunction with a dedicated WAN optimization solution, such as Silver Peak’s NX series appliances. Silver Peak employs a variety of optimization techniques that improve backup transfer times while maximizing WAN utilization in a CommVault environment, including disk based data reduction, Quality of Service (QoS), TCP acceleration, and loss mitigation. The result is reduced recovery times and improved recovery point objectives, which are critical to business continuity plans.
- Improve data transfer times.
Silver Peak’s Network Memory recognizes repetitive information and sends a pointer to deliver the information locally, a concept known as data reduction. This dramatically improves the time it takes to transfer large backup images and enables more replication streams to take place in a given period of time.
- Maximize WAN efficiency.
Network Memory can reduce over 95% of WAN traffic by eliminating the transfer of duplicate information. Network memory fingerprints at the individual byte level, enabling Silver Peak to detect and eliminate repetitive patterns even when the backup/replication solution is performing similar functions at the block level, as is the case with CommVault Galaxy software.
In addition, Silver Peak leverages advanced compression techniques to further reduce the amount of WAN bandwidth required for backup and replication. These techniques work in both directions of a WAN link, improving the backup/replication process while ensuring that the WAN can efficiently handle a restore if needed. By providing compression within the acceleration appliance, this functionality can be offloaded from the CommVault server, ensuring better scalability and performance. In addition, significant performance improvement can be provided even when non-repetitive information is sent across the WAN.
- Latency mitigation.
CommVault's backup software leverages the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) for transport. As a result,it is subject to the latency issues that often accompany this protocol. Silver Peak helps to overcome these issues by leveraging a variety of TCP acceleration techniques, including selective acknowledgements, high speed TCP, and increased TCP window sizes.
- Reduce packet loss and delivery errors.
Silver Peak reduces the impact of both packet loss and jitter that occurs when router links are oversubscribed. This is handled via adaptive Forward Error Correction (FEC), a technology that is used to reconstitute lost packets at the far end of a WAN link, avoiding delays that come with multiple-round-trip retransmissions. The Silver Peak solution dynamically adjusts the FEC overhead in response to changing link conditions for maximum effectiveness in environments with high packet loss.
- Quality of Service.
Application level QoS can be used to ensure that replication services receive higher priority than other traffic, and that the appropriate bandwidth is always available for data management applications. This is particularly useful when the secondary server is not located in a dedicated disaster recovery site and a variety of business applications are vying for the same shared WAN bandwidth.
Silver Peak “typically” provides 10-35x (90-97%) aggregate performance improvements when performing backups and recoveries across the WAN using CommVault.
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