Tunneling Protocols

Don’t sacrifice application performance for the convenience of connecting locations with L2TP, GRE or any other tunneling protocol. Silver Peak optimizes every application, even when encapsulated within a tunnel.  Replicate data, synchronize databases, move files – regardless of the task, Silver Peak can accelerate it over the WAN by as much as 20X or more. 

Tunneling protocols, such a GRE and L2TP, are common tools for interconnecting two similar networks over a different network. But regardless of the protocol, tunneling presents a challenge for application performance over distance.

The tunneling protocol itself is susceptible to the limited throughput, high packet loss and out-of-order packets (OOPs) rates endemic to long-distance connections. The protocols running within the tunnel are exposed to these same problems, but cannot be optimized through common application acceleration techniques as the encapsulation process masks the tunneled application from most application acceleration devices. IPSec, often used to secure tunneled traffic, may also increase delay due to increased packet fragmentation.

Silver Peak addresses the problems undermining tunneling performance without any protocol tweaking or custom configuration. All tunneling protocols are secured and optimized, regardless of whether they run over IP, UDP, TCP or a proprietary IP-based protocol. The same is true with the applications that run across these protocols. More specifically, Silver Peak applies these technologies to the following performance challenges: 

• Bandwidth – Silver Peak byte-level deduplication removes redundant tunneling protocol data from the WAN. The first time the tunneling protocol 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 tunneling protocols 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 tunneling protocol 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 all 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. Download and deploy it yourself in just 20 minutes or contact us to see how Silver Peak can help your team.