Silver Peak Systems, Inc.

Double-Take® Software provides leading host-based data replication and failover solutions that enable enterprises to protect business-critical data. Silver Peak complements Double-Take by accelerating replication and recovery across a Wide Area Network (WAN). By delivering 20x aggregate performance improvements, Silver Peak also increases the reliability of these critical business processes.  The combined Silver Peak/Double-Take solution ensures maximum data accessibility with minimal exposure to risk. 

Increase Data Accessibility with Silver Peak and Double-Take

When Double-Take is deployed in conjunction with Silver Peak, enterprises improve the reliability of network backups, while dramatically accelerating data recovery.

• Improve data transfer times.
  Silver Peak's Network Memory™ recognizes repetitive information and sends a pointer to deliver the information locally, a concept known as data reduction.  This is particularly useful as duplicate information is sent across the WAN, as is often the case with disaster recovery.  It is common to see 10-30x average improvements in data transfer times when Silver Peak is deploying with Double-Take.
• Maximize WAN efficiency.
  Network Memory can reduce over 95% of WAN traffic by eliminating the transfer of duplicate information.  Whereas most storage solutions perform data deduplication on blocks of information (64 KB to 1 MB), Network Memory fingerprints at the individual byte level.  This enables Silver Peak to detect and eliminate repetitive patterns even when the backup/replication solution is performing similar functions, as is the case with Double-Take.  In addition, by performing data reduction across many different WAN applications, SIlver Peak leverages economies of scale to get more "hits" during the fingerprinting process.  For example, Network Memory uses information stored from ongoing WAN activity (e.g., file transfers, email, etc) to make the first pass of a replication appear like a secondary pass. 
  
  In addition, Silver Peak leverages advanced compression techniques to further reduce the amount of WAN bandwidth required for backup and replication. These techniques work in both directions of a WAN link, improving the backup/replication process while ensuring that the WAN can efficiently handle a restore if needed. By using compression in addition to data reduction, significant performance improvement can be provided even when non-repetitive information is sent across the WAN.
• Offload CPU processes from server.
  By providing compression within the acceleration appliance, Silver Peak offloads this functionality from the host replication server, ensuring better scalability and performance. 
• Latency mitigation.
  Double-Take leverages the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) for transport.  As a result, it is subject to the latency issues that often accompany this protocol.  Silver Peak helps to overcome these issues by leveraging a variety of TCP acceleration techniques, including selective acknowledgements, high speed TCP, and increased TCP window sizes.
• Reduce packet loss and delivery errors.
  Many replication products will back off in the face of packet loss to prevent overloading of the network, resulting in degraded application performance.  Silver Peak reduces the impact of both packet loss and jitter using adaptive Forward Error Correction (FEC), a technology that is used to reconstitute lost packets at the far end of a WAN link, avoiding delays that come with multiple-round-trip retransmissions. The Silver Peak solution dynamically adjusts the FEC overhead in response to changing link conditions for maximum effectiveness in environments with high packet loss.
• Quality of Service.
  Application level QoS can be used to ensure that replication services receive higher priority than other traffic, and that the appropriate bandwidth is always available for data management applications.  This is particularly useful when the secondary server is not located in a dedicated disaster recovery site and a variety of business applications are vying for the same shared WAN bandwidth.  Silver Peak’s QoS capabilities can be used in conjunction with Double-Take’s own bandwidth scheduling tools to ensure end-to-end quality of service guarantees.

Silver Peak “typically” provides 10-30x (90-95%) aggregate performance improvements in Double-Take environments, with peaks reaching 100x.  This is evidenced in the following customer examples