SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sep. 16, 2014 – Silver Peak today announced that Perkins Coie, a worldwide legal advisory service, has successfully deployed Silver Peak WAN optimization software to create a software-defined wide area network (SDWAN) and accelerate branch office connectivity.
With 19 offices and 950 attorneys in the United States and Asia, Perkins Coie understands the complexities of managing remote offices and challenges of servicing demanding users. The IT team thought it had a solution – deploy another vendor’s WAN optimization hardware. But as Perkins Coie’s network demands grew, so too did the problems. Attorneys faced long wait times and began receiving error messages when checking out documents from the firm’s document management system. The company relied on NetApp for replication, but replication times over the WAN increased to the point that the IT team was unable to meet its committed 90-minute recovery point objective (RPO).
The Perkins Coie IT team decided to overhaul its existing WAN with Silver Peak software. The application performance improvement provided by Silver Peak software matched or exceeded that of all other hardware products. Users stopped complaining about IT and replication jobs that previously required hours to complete and now finished in less than 30 minutes.
“Silver Peak’s software was the best product of this caliber that we’ve implemented. Other so-called leading vendors needed to sell us several products to get to where you get with Silver Peak,” says Frank Riordan, director of infrastructure technology at Perkins Coie. “There have only been a few products over the past several years whose support have really impressed me, and Silver Peak was one of them.”
The Perkins Coie team was able to deliver Silver Peak software to locations on two different continents in just two hours, compared to the days or weeks it would have otherwise taken to deliver WAN optimization hardware to those same locations. Remote office performance problems were solved, and by leveraging the Silver Peak Unity WAN fabric in the future, Perkins Coie can extend WAN control and optimization to Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.
“The idea that you could download and install this software by yourself with everything virtualized – it was an eye-opener for us,” continues Riordan. “Now, when an office needs more bandwidth, it’s just a matter of licensing up in the field. We don’t have to worry about hardware not being sufficient or the normal refresh cycle. It’s really an appealing model.”
Perkins Coie also found new uses for the Silver Peak software. Silver Peak is unique in optimizing applications that run over the TCP, UDP and even proprietary, IP-based protocols. As such, Perkins Coie found it could use Silver Peak to improve its VoIP system, which relies on UDP. By optimizing VoIP traffic, Perkins Coie was able to back up their remote Cisco VoIP server, improving branch survivability.
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Silver Peak software unifies cloud, Internet and WAN on a single fabric, giving IT complete visibility and control over the new network while ensuring consistent performance for every application. Transform your network today at www.silver-peak.com.