Cisco Unified Communications

Maximize your investment in Cisco Unified Communications by eliminating the network problems that undermine the quality and availability of unified communications over distance. Silver Peak can reduce or eliminate the packet loss and out-of-order packets that undermine voice, video and other real-time communications. With Silver Peak, calls become clearer and collaboration more responsive, even across unpredictable Internet connections.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (also known as CallManager) is the core call control application of Cisco’s collaboration portfolio. UC Manager integrates a range of collaboration tools, such video and screen sharing, with voice over IP (VoIP). While effective within the office, unified communications becomes unpredictable across long distances and the Internet. Calls may drop or fail to connect. Audio may become garbled and the video unclear.

Branch office availability also becomes problematic. As the distances grow between branch offices and the UC Manager, so do the chances that brownouts, blackouts, and other events will disrupt branch office voice services. Survivability can be delivered by locating a UC Manager at the branch, but then the enterprise must incur additional costs and complexity. Restoring voice services is also made  more difficult as replicating UC Manager configuration parameters to the branch within the necessary timeframe may be impossible.

More bandwidth will not solve the problem. TCP performance degrades as delay increases regardless of  bandwidth and as a real-time application, VoIP is highly sensitive to jitter, latency, and packet loss all commonly found on the Internet. A good quality VoIP call will compensate for no more than 30ms of jitter, yet jitter rates on congested networks, such as the Internet, can average 120 ms. Packet loss rates should be kept under 1 percent, but again across Internet-based, virtual private network (VPNs) packet loss rates average one percent and are often much higher. And while a VoIP call can operate in as a little as 31 Kbps (G.729), organizations need to be sure the bandwidth is available even when it’s already being consumed by other applications.

Silver Peak addresses all of those issues, improving the availability and the voice quality of Cisco UC. By connecting branch offices to multiple providers, such as MPLS and the Internet or multiple Internet connections, organizations can protect branch office against service provider failures without sacrificing performance. Silver Peak’s real-time intelligence monitors those connections, identifying the best path for carrying VoIP traffic, and then switching traffic to alternate paths depending on network conditions. Audio quality is improved also by compensating for network problems. Specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following performance challenges: 

• Congestion – Silver Peak minimizes or eliminates the effects of network congestion, making VoIP calls consistently clearer and more predictable across congested WANs. Silver Peak’s Forward Error Correction (FEC) eliminated as much as 90 percent of packet loss in independent testing by regenerating packets in real-time at the far end of a WAN link. Packet Order Correction (POC) resequences packets in real-time, avoiding retransmission and processing delays from out-of-order packets. Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic shaping guarantee VoIP receives the necessary bandwidth on congested networks.  The culmination of those capabilities has been shown to practically eliminate 120 msec of jitter from a connection.  
• Bandwidth – Silver Peak  byte-level deduplication  eliminates redundant data across the WAN, making more bandwidth available for Cisco UC calls and simplifying the protection of Cisco UC databases by replicating them offsite. The first time an application sends data it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests are fulfilled by the local Silver Peak instance.  
• Latency – Silver Peak mitigates latency, improving the collaboration tools in Cisco UC with TCP Acceleration, which includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Sharing or accessing files with the Common Internet File System (CIFS) is made faster with CIFS Acceleration, which includes CIFS read-ahead, CIFS write-behind, and CIFS metadata optimizations.  Latency is also reduced through packet coalescing, which re-packages multiple smaller packets into a single larger one, and through Dynamic Path Control, which selects the fastest path to a remote location.

Silver Peak protects the files and data used during a video conferencing collaboration in-flight between locations with an Accelerated IPSec,  virtual private network (VPN) running AES-256, the enterprise standard for data encryption. Data-at-rest within Silver Peak instances is also encrypted with AES. End-to-end encryption is provided by SSL/TLS.  

Silver Peak offers the most scalable and cost-effective data acceleration software for connecting data centers, remote offices and the cloud. You can download and deploy it  as a free, self-service trial in just 20 minutes or contact us to see how Silver Peak can help your organization.