Silver Peak Speeds Masterpet’s Data Replication Across the Tasman

Software-based Data Acceleration Equals Faster Veeam Remote Replication 

Singapore. October 30, 2013 – Pet products and services company Masterpet has streamlined its nightly Veeam virtual machine (VM) replication and disaster recovery (DR) exchange between New Zealand and Australia. Using Silver Peak data acceleration software, Masterpet is now transmitting three times more data twice as fast over a five megabit-per-second (Mbps) connection.

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Masterpet’s nightly 500 megabyte (MB) VM replication process between Wellington and Sydney had previously taken 40 minutes to complete over the saturated 5 Mbps wide area network (WAN) connection. This was putting Masterpet’s recovery point objective (RPO) in jeopardy. Following a rapid install of the Silver Peak software, that same 5 Mbps connection now performs like a 140 Mbps connection. This has allowed Masterpet to increase the volume of its data replication to 1.6 Gigabytes (GB), which now takes just 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 Masterpet 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 (RDP) 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.”

Masterpet evaluated WAN acceleration from Riverbed and Silver Peak.  Following a fast and seamless trial of Silver Peak and because of the company’s focus on virtualization, Masterpet determined Silver Peak VRX software to be the ideal 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 1.6 GB in 22 minutes is the sort of result that is very consistent for us now and is helping us easily meet our RPO.”

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

“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.”