Network File System (NFS)

Access files easily with NFS regardless of office location. Silver Peak corrects the problems that disrupt NFS performance across long distances or congested networks. Copy files to remote servers faster, share files easier. With Silver Peak, NFS transfers across distance improve by as much as eight times.

NFS is a popular distributed file system commonly found in the UNIX/LINUX environment that runs across TCP or UDP. Many companies deploy centralized NFS file servers to lower costs and improve management.

But there can be an additional price to pay; NFS performance degrades significantly across distance. The protocol is particularly chatty, requiring many round-trips for even simple tasks, such as retrieving file attributes. The files retrieved by NFS may be too large for the limited throughput of the long-distance, TCP connection underlying NFS. Remote procedure calls (RPCs) only exacerbate the issue, adding latency and significantly slowing file transfers.

Silver Peak shortens NFS file transfer times and extends bandwidth to improve total cost of ownership. Eliminated are the protocol inefficiencies that slow NFS. File transfers consume less bandwidth whether they run over TCP or UDP. Packet loss, a major factor undermining TCP and NFS performance over distance, is reduced or eliminated in real-time. More specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following challenges:

• Bandwidth  – Silver Peak’s  byte-level deduplication  removes redundant NFS data from the WAN. Most deduplication algorithms are only implemented for TCP traffic. Silver Peak was the first vendor to implement deduplication for UDP and TCP traffic. The first time NFS 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  enabling NFS to operate more efficiently over distance.  TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Where organizations also share files using CIFS/SMB, they can be benefit from 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.
• Congestion – Silver Peak makes NFS 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 retransmission. Out-of-order packets are resequenced, avoiding retransmission and processing delays that occur when packets arrive out-of-order.

Silver Peak establishes an Accelerated IPSec virtual private network (VPN) between locations, securing all data with AES-256, the enterprise standard for data encryption. Data-at-rest in 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. Download and deploy it  yourself in just 20 minutes or contact us to see how Silver Peak can help your team.