Pet Company Masterpet Chooses Silver Peak VRX Software

Pet products and services company Masterpet Corporation Ltd. has streamlined its nightly Veeam VM replication and DR exchange between New Zealand and Australia.

Using Silver Peak Systems Inc. data acceleration software, it is transmitting three times more data twice as fast over a five Mb-per-second connection.

The nightly 500MB VM replication process between Wellington and Sydney had previously taken 40 minutes to complete over the saturated 5Mbps WAN connection. This was putting the RPO in jeopardy. Following an install of the Silver Peak software, that same 5Mbps connection performs like a 140Mbps connection. This has allowed the business to increase the volume of its data replication to 1.6GB, which takes 22 minutes to transfer.

“Silver Peak is giving us a full four hours of unused space to push more data through if need be,” said Sean White, Masterpet’s ICT manager for Australasia.

In addition to its data centers at the head offices in Wellington and in Sydney, the company has branch offices in Auckland and Christchurch, which run a variety of applications over the WAN. Internet voice traffic accounts for a big portion of the bandwidth being consumed, along with email, remote desktop sessions, web and file-sharing.

VM backups started to saturate the link during the past year, as the company moved most of its servers to a virtual environment. White responded by evaluating ways of streamlining and improving WAN performance.

“First we investigated a larger link, but the cost was prohibitive,” he said. “We needed to improve our DR processes without extending the link, so we began to investigate WAN acceleration solutions.”

The company evaluated WAN acceleration from Riverbed and Silver Peak. Following a trial of Silver Peak and because of the company’s focus on virtualization, it determined Silver Peak VRX software to be the fit for their environment.

“Silver Peak software installs easily into our environment and performs better than any hardware optimization product we’ve seen,” says White. “Looking at the figures, the transfer of 1.6GB in 22 minutes is the sort of result that is very consistent for us now and is helping us easily meet our RPO.”

It uses Veeam for its virtual replication, and also needed to ensure that any data acceleration solution interoperate with Veeam. White and the IT team found the process of installing Silver Peak with Veeam easy and found the products complement each other.

“It is very easy to perform our Veeam backups now that the WAN is working so efficiently,” White added. “We wanted something that sits there in the background and quietly makes our replication faster.“