Video Conferencing

Video conferencing systems are supposed to make remote collaboration easier, but when distances grow and packet loss mounts, user frustration increases. Video becomes pixelated while voice becomes garbled. Silver Peak improves video conferencing systems by correcting the effects of packet loss in real-time, allowing any video conferencing systems - whether from Tandberg, Polycom or any other video conferencing provider – to become clearer, and more effective. With Silver Peak, users focus on collaborating not on video conferencing.

Whether delivered as a conference room set or integrated into a unified communications desktop, video conferencing can be an important tool for distributed collaboration. But as organizations adopt HD video conferencing and look to run any video conferencing system across longer distances or more unreliable networks, such as the Internet, the video conferencing experience often suffers. Calls drop, video becomes pixelated and voice becomes unintelligible.

The problem is the network. Both the Internet, and to a lesser extent MPLS networks, suffer from the effects of network congestion, namely packet loss, out-of-order packets, and jitter. Packet loss rates above .05 percent interfere with HD video conferencing; loss rates higher than one percent will interfere with generic video conferencing systems. Internet virtual private networks (VPNs) average 1 percent packet loss; MPLS networks will average .1 percent packet loss.

There’s also the bandwidth issue. Conventional video conferencing systems require 384 – 768 Kbps plus network overhead per video conferencing end-point; high-definition video conferencing can require up to 12.6 Mbps plus network overhead per video conferencing end-point. Delivering consistently, high-quality video conferencing across already congested VPNs connections is often impossible. This is particularly true as enterprises look to deliver video conferencing to every desktop or to adopt HD video conferencing their offices.

Silver Peak eliminates more than 90 percent of the packet loss from a network connection, dramatically improving the quality and consistency of video conferencing systems. More specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following challenges facing video conferencing: 

• Congestion – Silver Peak improves the video conferencing experience, making it more predictable across congested WANs. Packet loss is reduced or eliminated by regenerating packets in real-time at the far end of a WAN link. Out-of-order packets are resequenced, avoiding retransmission and processing delays that occur when packets arrive out-of-order. Quality of Service (QOS) and traffic shaping guarantee video conferencing receives sufficient bandwidth when necessary by configuring a maximum wait time.
• Bandwidth – Silver Peak byte-level deduplication eliminates enterprise applications from sending redundant data across the WAN, making more bandwidth available for video conferencing. 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, enabling the collaboration tools used with video conferencing, such as file transfer and screen sharing, to operate more efficiently over distance using 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 with an Accelerated IPSec VPN running 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. 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.