Veritas
™ Volume Replicator (VVR) enables enterprises to replicate IP data over any distance in both a synchronous and asynchronous manner. It can be used across heterogeneous platforms, and supports both UDP and TCP as transport protocols. UDP is often the protocol of choice as it is easy to setup and offers increased performance across the WAN. As a result, Silver Peak is uniquely positioned to optimize the VVR application.
Improving the Performance and reliability of VVR
Silver Peak works with Veritas Volume Replicator to improve the replication process in the following ways:
Silver Peak helps to minimize Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). This is achieved with Silver Peak’s Network Memory technology, which recognizes repetitive information and delivers it locally, a concept known as data reduction. Silver Peak offers the only data reduction solution on the market that accelerates both TCP and UDP traffic, accommodating all VVR deployment methods.
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 VVR. 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.
By providing compression within the acceleration appliance, Silver Peak offloads this functionality from the host replication server, ensuring better scalability and performance.
Many replication products will back off in the face of packet loss to prevent overloading of the network, resulting in degraded application performance. Silver Peak reduces the impact of both packet loss and jitter using 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.
Silver Peak “typically” provides 10-20x (90-95%) aggregate performance improvements in VVR environments, with peak improvements reaching 200x (99%).
