Resource Center

Users in branch offices and remote offices have traditionally had a difficult time accessing files stored in remote data centers. The Windows file system relies on CIFS/SMB a chatty protocol that performs poorly over the WAN. Silver Peak corrects CIFS chattiness, accelerating the transfer of data to the branch office or remote office. This document explains how Silver Peak enable centrally managed file services to dramatically improve branch office and remote office productivity.

It has historically been difficult to deliver Microsoft® E-mail (Outlook and Exchange) over a WAN or dial-up connection. That is because e-mail transfers typically require a lot of bandwidth, which is often limited when communicating to remote or branch offices. In addition, the underlying architecture for communication with a Microsoft Exchange Server, called the Mobile-based Messaging API (MAPI), causes significant delay when communicating across a WAN.

Many remote/branch offices create, access, and share data with central data centers as well as other remote/branch offices. At the same time, there is an increasing the requirement to better manage and utilize the remote data in a centralized environment. Access to this consolidated storage is typically over a wide area network (WAN) links which are shared by both data traffic as well as unified communications (VOIP and video).

Limited WAN bandwidth, network congestion, latency, and dropped packets can all wreak havoc on data replication between data centers over the Wide Area Network (WAN). Any one of these issues can dramatically increase replication time, exceeding recovery point objective (RPO) times or even preventing replication from happening altogether

Enterprises are becoming ever more virtual – with many remote offices creating, accessing, and sharing data with centralized offices and other remote facilities. The result has been an explosion of unstructured data (content and files). While much of this data is stored centrally, it must be accessed by many different distributed locations, which creates a unique challenge for storage and network managers.