Dell Storage Forum —ZLTO is an association that handles national relations for over 18,000 farmers across the Netherlands. With data volumes on the rise, the association was having difficulty meeting its recovery point objective (RPO) over the existing network infrastructure. ZLTO deployed Silver Peak software with a Dell EqualLogic storage solution to accelerate its offsite replication workloads cost-effectively and meet its five-minute RPO without upgrading the wide area network (WAN) infrastructure.

ZLTO has two Dell EqualLogic storage groups that are used as data stores for the company’s VMware virtualized environment. The association runs all local servers and applications from these SAN groups, with each location serving as a failover site for the other in the case of an unexpected outage. ZLTO had been allocating 20 megabits-per-second (Mbps) of a 50 Mbps wide area network (WAN) for storage replication, which involves starting a new auto-replication process every five minutes for six different volumes in production. However, WAN bandwidth, distance and network quality challenges were continually slowing the replication processes.

“Even though the distance between our data center and disaster recovery site is not terribly long, we were still having difficulty replicating between the two locations,” said Bart Haans, ICT manager for ZLTO. “The WAN link between our two locations did not provide enough capacity to support rapid synchronization of all our volumes.”

Silver Peak Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) software works in concert with Dell EqualLogic to overcome common network challenges that hamper offsite replication. The Silver Peak virtual solutions are known for high-scalability and performance, and run on every major hypervisor—simplifying data center and offsite deployments. The result is 20x faster offsite replication on-average over the WAN.

“We were able to install the solution simply by redirecting the traffic between the EqualLogic arrays through the Silver Peak virtual appliance,” said Haans. “No changes to the network were required, and we were up-and-running accelerating traffic in just a few hours.”

With Silver Peak, ZLTO reduced the amount of bandwidth required for replication by 86%. In addition, ZLTO is now able to move almost 11 Terabytes (TB) of traffic over the existing WAN in a 24-hour period, helping the association replicate all six of their production volumes in the desired five-minute intervals.

Additional Resources

• Free trial of Silver Peak for Dell EqualLogic
• Read the WAN Speak blog
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• 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, big data and disaster recovery. Download Silver Peak software today at www.silver-peak.com/marketplace.

Note: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, and Silver Peak VXOA are all trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.