SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 29, 2013 -- Mature companies need mature data recovery solutions. Just ask Aramex, a leading international transportation and logistics company. Aramex needed to shrink its 24-hour recovery point objective (RPO) to meet tighter disaster recovery procedures and appeal to prospective customers who demanded higher levels of business continuity. The task seemed impossible until the company deployed replication acceleration software from Silver Peak Systems.
Aramex has more than 300 offices in 50 countries, including four primary data centers in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Each data center hosts key applications that include shipment tracking, billing and productivity applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Lync. Data is stored and replicated using Dell EqualLogic in each data center that is connected via 50 megabit-per-second (Mbps) Internet VPN connections.
The company knew that off-site data replication was the correct approach, but preliminary testing proved to be impossible over the existing wide area network (WAN). It was taking more than four days to replicate 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, and to make matters worse, the company could only allocate a fraction of its bandwidth to the Dell EqualLogic replication workloads.
“A round trip time of up to 250 milliseconds between our data centers severely limited our offsite replication performance,” said Samer Awajan, CTO for Aramex.
Deploying Silver Peak data acceleration software with Dell EqualLogic, Aramex improved its off-site replication throughput by up to 50x while also accelerating other applications that also share the WAN bandwidth. As a Dell global preferred partner for WAN optimization, the Silver Peak software quickly and easily complements Dell EqualLogic by addressing the underlying network distance, capacity and quality issues that can hamper off-site replication performance.
“I didn’t know what to expect at the beginning, but the results quickly impressed me,” added Awajan. “Our replication rates improved substantially and the overall acceleration for other applications sharing the network was impressive.”
Aramex investigated various data acceleration products to address their replication headaches, but Silver Peak emerged as the clear leader with the highest performance solutions, tight integration with Dell EqualLogic and virtual products that helped simplify distribution and installation.
“A virtual solution was important to us for lowering our costs, simplifying installation, and improving our agility,” added Awajan. “After implementing Silver Peak in our main data center, we can then train our personnel, try different scenarios, and once we are ready, just vMotion the Silver Peak software to our remote data center. There are no shipping costs, delivery delays, or difficult remote training events that we typically deal with when installing a hardware device.”
Demonstration at Dell Enterprise Forum
Silver Peak is showcasing its industry-leading data acceleration software at the Dell Enterprise Forum, booth #401, being held June 4-6, 2013 in San Jose, CA.
Additional Resources
- Read the WAN Speak blog
- Follow @SilverPeak on Twitter
- Watch Silver Peak videos on YouTube
- Connect with Silver Peak on LinkedIn
About Silver Peak Systems
Silver Peak software accelerates data between data centers, branch offices and the cloud. The company’s software-defined acceleration solves network quality, capacity and distance challenges to provide fast and reliable access to data anywhere in the world. Leveraging its leadership in data center class wide area network (WAN) optimization, Silver Peak is a key enabler for strategic IT projects like virtualization, disaster recovery and cloud computing. Download Silver Peak software today at marketplace.silver-peak.com.