Resource Center

Server consolidation reduces costs, but it also introduces network challenges that left unaddressed can undermine business processes. Just ask SMTC, a global electronics manufacturing services provider. The company had successfully consolidated servers into its Markham, Ontario data center, but as the company’s WAN become more congested, essential business applications – ERP, CRM, and more – became unusable. 

Living for a summer in the Canadian Rockies is daunting enough; counselors and staff should not have to worry about being cut off from the outside world. So when Internet access started failing at the camp’s of Tim Horton Children’s Foundation, a philanthropic unit of the largest coffee chain in Canada, the IT team knew they needed a solution – fast. Problem was that the camps were heavy users of video communications and wireless connections – a deadly combination for WAN optimization solutions. Most WAN optimization solutions are unable to accelerate UDP-based protocols, such as video conferencing, and none can compensate in real-time for lost and out-of-order packets common to wireless links, which undermine video session.

When Storage Area Network (SAN) replication stalls, some companies might just throw more bandwidth at the problem, but not Priva B.V. The Dutch manufacturer of building management and climate control systems makes a point of conserving natural resources – and WAN bandwidth, apparently. Instead of purchasing more bandwidth to replicate traffic between its Dutch locations, Priva improved NetApp® SnapMirror replication nearly six-fold with Silver Peak WAN acceleration. “Our partner, Storedata, recommended we try Silver Peak,” says Ed de Jong, IT network engineer at Priva, “We found we were able to move nearly ten-times the data over our existing Internet connection, without spending a single Euro more on bandwidth.”

The road to Silver Peak started with a surprise. University Federal Credit Union (UFCU) of Austin, Texas had partnered with another institution to create a business continuity site. As part of its redundancy plan, UFCU moved its backup Symitar server to the new site. They began testing backups, Failover, and Remote Poster and found it was taking 12-15 hours to transfer a backup! David Perego, UFCU’s Host Services Team Lead, explained the problem. “We purchased a large-bandwidth circuit for this and other data transfers with a goal of 2-4 hours for the copy. But even with this circuit, latency and packet loss made that goal impossible.”