SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 11, 2013 — Extending enterprise services and applications to branch offices often presents many IT challenges. Sluggish Web applications and long file transfers can threaten user productivity and increase corporate risk of data loss. Topcon Positioning Systems faced these challenges, and while the company knew it could solve its problems with WAN optimization, the company realized deploying WAN optimization hardware would be impractical and expensive for many reasons.
Instead, Topcon engineers chose an innovative solution – run Silver Peak virtual WAN acceleration in their existing Cisco routers. Topcon improved throughput dramatically without adding hardware.
Topcon Positioning System is part of the Topcon Group, a diversified company providing GPS products, laser eye care and laser surgery. The Topcon data center connects to 15 remote offices via multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and general Internet connections. The remote offices are spread across Asia Pacific, Europe and the US with the global data center and IT headquarters in Livermore, California.
As Topcon expanded its business, so did the congestion on their network. The Australian development team working on Topcon’s global positioning software started having problems sharing code with developers in Moscow. Apache Subversion (SVN), the group’s versioning software, could not transfer the code in time to the other office, while the Jira project management software used to track projects was proving sluggish.
“Transfers from our Adelaide office to our Moscow office would be left to run overnight and still not complete by the morning,” says Dean Robinson, senior network engineer at Topcon. “We even tried transferring pieces of code at a time with no success.”
Topcon knew it needed a faster solution to transferring data, but was hesitant to invest in expensive and bulky hardware. “Closet space in some of our remote offices is quite tight. We were worried about deploying a physical appliance that would consume rack space and generate heat,” says Robinson.
PeakIP Solutions, an IT integrator, introduced Topcon to Silver Peak Systems. Silver Peak’s Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) software not only delivers leading optimization performance, but managers in charge of data acceleration can download and deploy the solution in minutes across a wide variety of hardware platforms including off-the-shelf servers, blade servers, and routers.
“We really liked Silver Peak’s story,” Robinson says, “The focus on virtualization aligned with our strategic direction. Everything we’re doing moving forward we’re trying to do it a virtual environment, if possible.”
Topcon had already invested in virtualization and had Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) at some of the branch offices. Running VXOA on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Express blades in those ISRs meant no additional hardware would be needed at the branch.
The team downloaded Silver Peak software from the virtual marketplace for a free trial. VXOA software tackled all three problems facing Topcon: loss, latency and bandwidth. VXOA reduced packet loss by 41 percent, overcame bandwidth limitations by reducing CIFS traffic by 81 percent and HTTP by 75 percent. Coupled with protocol acceleration techniques to overcome latency, Topcon saw the effective throughput on its 2 Mbps connections increase to 805 Mbps.
About Silver Peak
Silver Peak software accelerates data movement between data centers, remote offices and the cloud. Download a free trial at http://marketplace.silver-peak.com.