Silver Peak Systems, Inc.

Network Appliance’s “Snapshot” technology provides IT with the ability to make real-time copies of their data for disaster recovery.  Network Appliance offers several Snapshot software products, including SnapVault® and SnapMirror®, which are designed for replication and recovery over the WAN.  By improving the performance and reliability of these applications between data centers, Silver Peak is a perfect fit for environments using these software tools for business continuity.

Improving Data Management with Silver Peak and NetApp

Silver Peak improves SnapVault and SnapMirror in the following ways:

• 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 is particularly useful when using SnapVault, which requires the repeated transfer of duplicate blocks of information.
• Maximize WAN efficiency.
  Network Memory can reduce over 95% of WAN traffic by eliminating the transfer of duplicate information.  Whereas most storage solutions perform data deduplication on blocks of information (64 KB to 1 MB), Network Memory fingerprints at the individual byte level.  This enables Silver Peak to detect and eliminate repetitive patterns even when the backup/replication solution is performing similar functions, as is the case with SnapVault and SnapMirror.  In addition, by performing data reduction across many different WAN applications, SIlver Peak leverages economies of scale to get more "hits" during the fingerprinting process.  For example, Network Memory uses information stored from ongoing WAN activity (e.g., file transfers, email, etc) to make the first pass of a replication appear like a secondary pass. 
  
  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 using compression in addition to data reduction, significant performance improvement can be provided even when non-repetitive information is sent across the WAN.
• Offload CPU processes from server.
  By providing compression within the acceleration appliance, Silver Peak offloads this functionality from the host replication server, ensuring better scalability and performance.
• Latency mitigation.
  Both SnapVault and SnapMirror leverage the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) for transport.  As a result, they are 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 10-20x (90-95%) aggregate performance improvements in Snapshot environments.