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It has historically been difficult to deliver Microsoft Exchange over a WAN or dial-up connection. That is because email transfers typically require a lot of bandwidth, which is often limited when communicating to remote or branch offices. In addition, the underlying architecture for communication with a Microsoft Exchange Server, called the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI), requires the transfer and ACKknowledgement of many small blocks of information every time a transaction occurs. This chattiness causes significant delay when communicating across a WAN.
The Introduction of Exchange 2003 helped to alleviate some of the underlying performance issues that plagued earlier version of Microsoft’s email platform. (Learn about the differences between Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 with "Cached Mode"). However, improvements in performance came at the expense of bandwidth.
Without the right form of application acceleration, many enterprises are still struggling with how to centralize Microsoft Exchange Servers in a reliable and cost effective way.
Eliminate Repetitive Information
Silver Peak’s Network Memory eliminates repetitive information from traversing the WAN, resulting in a significant reduction in WAN traffic and a major improvements in perceived email response time across the WAN – as much as 50x for Exchange 2003.
Intra-office Email – When Exchange servers are centralized, emails transferred between co-workers in the same office are sent across the WAN, wasting bandwidth and causing an unnecessary delay. With Silver-Peak’s Network Memory, while the request transparently goes back to the server, actual email content is intercepted and delivered locally.
Consider what happens when an email is sent to 200 people 10 offices. Prior to Silver Peak, 200 copies of this email will traverse the WAN (plus a copy in the ‘sent’ folder). With Silver Peak, the first ‘instance’ of data is compressed and then sent across each WAN link (10 total links). All remaining emails on the same link are delivered instantly via Network Memory, and do not traverse the network. The number of traversals can be reduced from 200 to 10, and compressed by a factor of 4, yielding an 80x improvement in performance.
Same Data, Different Application - Network Memory recognizes byte patterns instead of cached ‘objects’. Therefore, if the same data is included in multiple types of files (e.g., PowerPoint, Word, Excel, etc), Silver Peak will detect the repetitive information and prevent it from traversing the WAN during email exchanges.
Server Offload for Exchange Servers
Even though Exchange 2003 supports encrypted content, this places a serious load on the server CPU, slowing performance and reducing server scalability. With Silver Peak, all content is encrypted both locally and over the wire using advanced 128 bit AES encryption, eliminating the need to encrypt traffic directly on the Exchange Server.
Advanced Compression
Silver peak uses crossflow payload and header compression to reducing the amount of traffic that is sent via email, improving performance across the WAN - even on the first transmission.
Quality of Service (QoS)
Large volumes of email traffic can have a negative impact on other business critical applications. Silver Peak’s provides a robust set of Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities to prioritize real-time traffic, like VoIP, avoiding delay and jitter and ensuring adequate bandwidth.
Silver Peak appliances reduce WAN load and accelerate the performance of Microsoft Exchange, enabling email servers to be centrally located for easier management and better scalability.
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