Prudential Investment Company of Australia Opts for Silver Peak

Prudential Investment company of Australia Pty Ltd (PICA) has improved security, achieved backups that are five times faster, and is saving $5,000 a month on bandwidth costs it no longer requires – all after implementing data acceleration software from Silver Peak Systems, Inc.

With more than 500 staff at 25 locations from Port Douglas to Melbourne, PICA generates substantial amounts of critical data and replicates up to 600GB of data each day between its production and DR sites. However, when technical services manager Neal Krempin joined PICA, he found that hourly backups between the company’s data center site in Ultimo, Sydney, and the DR site in Port Melbourne often failed to complete on time, exposing the company to the risk of serious data loss.

“It quickly became apparent that we were having some issues getting all the data down to our DR site in Melbourne effectively,” said Krempin. “We run NetApp’s SnapMirror SAN-to-SAN replication and at first it worked quite well, but I found the process had to be monitored very closely to make sure each snapshot did not exceed the given time frame. We run hourly backups, and when the images failed to get through in time we would end up with a serious backlog. Sometimes I arrived on Monday morning to find a 24-hour queue of data had formed – it was like peak-hour on George Street.”

Realizing the need to streamline PICA’s backups, Krempin looked into increasing the company’s WAN capacity. Quotes for 20-30Mb/s of added bandwidth came in at more than $5,000 per month ($60,000 a year), so he began to explore other options. He invited NetApp and Silver Peak consulting firm, IT Consult, in to assess the problem. Steve Parsonage from IT Consult recommended a Silver Peak software trial, which he was confident would solve PICA’s off-site replication performance problems.

“I quickly found that Silver Peak’s software-based solution fit into our VMware virtual structure very well, since it is also built on a virtual platform,” added Krempin. “Silver Peak would allow us to speed up our WAN link and save us from having to invest in extra hardware, as well as saving on additional rack space, power and cabling.”

Previously, PICA’s WAN only achieved about 18Mb/s on a 20Mb/s link. After deployment of Silver Peak software, PICA now reports speeds of up to 100Mb/s – an improvement of more than 500%. PICA also benefits from Silver Peak’s network memory capabilities that de-duplicate data down to a transfer size of about 170GB.

Currently PICA is on an acquisition path, looking to double its size over the next few years. At present, the company holds about 20TB of data.

Krempin is confident that the Silver Peak software will allow him to continue accelerating backups and replication traffic efficiently despite the projected increase in data flow.