Another File Sharing Application

Let users access and share files easier and faster over distance. Silver Peak reduces the time and bandwidth needed to access remote file stores. With Silver Peak, even distant offices can access centralized file servers easily and efficiently.

Centralizing file servers lower costs and improves manageability, but it can also create performance problems. As servers are located farther away from users, retrieving and sending files takes significantly longer. File sharing may also consume a significant amount of the remote office’s wide area network (WAN) bandwidth, degrading the performance of other applications running across the WAN.

Simply increasing that bandwidth will not improve file sharing performance. File sharing protocols, such as CIFS/SMB, and TCP degrade over distance regardless of WAN bandwidth. Even when distance is nominal, delay may be significant due to network congestion, routing policies, and peering practices of the intervening provider networks.

Silver Peak addresses the problems undermining file transfer performance over distance. Eliminated are the protocol inefficiencies that increase file transfer times and undermine user productivity. Reduced is the amount of data that must be transferred across the WAN, enabling file sharing to make better use of the available bandwidth. Specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following challenges:

• Bandwidth – Silver Peak’s byte-level deduplication removes redundant file sharing data from the WAN. The first time a file sharing application sends data it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests are fulfilled by the local Silver Peak instance. Customer experiences show that Silver Peak can improve file sharing performance across the WAN by as much as 20X. 
• Latency – Silver Peak mitigates latency enabling file sharing applications to operate more efficiently over distance. TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. CIFS Acceleration 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.
• Congestion – Silver Peak makes file sharing application performance more predictable across congested WANs. Lost packets are reconstituted in real-time at the far end of a WAN link, avoiding delays that come with multiple round-trip retransmissions. Out-of-order packets are resequenced, avoiding retransmission and processing delays that occur when packets arrive out-of-order.

Silver Peak protects file sharing data 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.