Silver Peak Study Finds Data Explosion Driving Need for More Off-Site Data Replication

Commissioned Study by Independent Consulting Firm Shows Businesses Constrained by Network Limitations

Singapore. February 26, 2013 – An explosion of data being stored by businesses and the need to protect that data in the wake of recent natural disasters has nearly three-quarters (72%) of organizations seeking to do more off-site data replication according to WAN Acceleration Fast-Tracks Data Protection And Disaster Recovery, a February 2013 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Silver Peak Systems.

The study also showed that two-thirds (66%) of businesses believe they are limited by their wide area network (WAN) performance, which is preventing them from fully utilizing off-site data replication.

According to the study, as data volumes and replication distances grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to put in place an efficient and reliable disaster recovery (DR) plan. The study found that 65% of businesses have more than 100 terabytes of data company-wide, and 39% have more than a petabyte. More than half of all respondents (54%) said that data replication takes too long and nearly half (44%) are not meeting their recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO). This explains why approximately one-third of data (34%) is not replicated at all, leaving that data at risk, and why most respondents (53%) stated that upgrading their current DR plans within the next 12 months is a high or critical priority.

Data acceleration solutions are commonly deployed to complement and accelerate off-site data replication over a WAN. However, the study indicated that several additional factors would be necessary before replication acceleration could be considered. A large majority (76%) agreed that it was important or very important for off-site replication acceleration to be low-cost and easy to configure and manage, while 72% wanted a solution that required no changes to the existing network configuration. The study concludes that recent advances in virtualization technology now make it possible to deliver a replication acceleration solution that is software-based.

“With the advent of virtualization and simpler deployment models, new virtual WAN acceleration solutions are affordable, simple to deploy, easily integrated with existing virtualization and storage environments, and support a wide range of storage vendor replication technologies out of the box,” said the study. “With low-cost WAN acceleration delivered as a downloadable virtual machine (software), every IT administrator with responsibility for data protection will be able to replicate more data quickly and reliably over longer distances without breaking the bank.”

“As this study points out, data acceleration software is a proven method to overcome performance challenges for long distance off-site replication,” said Rick Tinsley, president and CEO of Silver Peak. “By deploying Silver Peak’s Velocity solution for replication, enterprises can easily meet their RPOs, lower disaster recovery costs, and extend distances between replication sites.”