Produce World reduces WAN traffic by 80 percent and bandwidth allowance by half with Silver Peak

One of the largest expert growers and suppliers of high-quality fresh vegetables in Europe, Produce World has found the key to improving the performance of offsite data replication. Since deploying Silver Peak’s wide area network (WAN) optimisation software, Produce World has increased data throughput, reduced traffic by 80 percent and cut bandwidth allowance by 50 percent.

As a growing business with six locations across the UK, Produce World found that the data mobility between its primary data centre in Peterborough and disaster recovery (DR) site 90 miles away, was taking three times longer than expected because of its 40 megabits-per-second (Mbps) network bandwidth allowance. This was making it increasingly difficult to meet its recovery point objectives (RPOs) and placed a huge strain on the IT department. As such, the company needed to consider optimising its existing IT infrastructure, with the ultimate aim of reducing its RPO from 24 hours to 15 minutes for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and two hours for other critical systems.

In order to meet the increased demands of replicating data, Produce World first considered adding more bandwidth before finally turning to leading IT services provider, Kelway, to provide a solution that would make better use of its existing IT infrastructure. For three months, Produce World carried out proof of concept (POC) on WAN optimisation providers, including Riverbed, but selected Silver Peak as the clear winner for its high performance, simple deployment and lower cost. In addition, Silver Peak stood out for its ability to easily integrate with the company’s existing NetApp SnapMirror replication environment. The company selected the Silver Peak VX software, which is purpose-built for storage replication and scales to over 1 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) connections.

“As our business expanded, the need to get more data between sites was becoming increasingly difficult,” said Richard Billington, infrastructure manager at Produce World. “It was taking a whole weekend for the replication to catch up which, as you can imagine, was causing a real headache for the IT department. We tested other WAN solutions, but Silver Peak performed far beyond our expectations and requirements, and is enabling us to easily meet our RPO.”

Following the Silver Peak deployment, Produce World was forced to move its DR servers to one of its own sites due to its then co-location provider closing down its data centre. Going from running on a 40 Mbps bandwidth link to a 6mbps connection could have resulted in disaster, however with Silver Peak software already in place, the company was able to continue replicating data on the temporary site efficiently for a period of around six months. Since moving to its new DR site, the Silver Peak implementation has meant the company only requires 20 Mbps of network bandwidth allowance, cutting its previous bandwidth requirement in half and significantly reducing costs.

“Without Silver Peak, it would have been increasingly difficult to replicate all of our data between the data centre and DR site over a 6 Mbps WAN link,” continued Billington. “However, we managed to keep the data centre up and running for a period of six months without any performance issues. Today, our 20mbps WAN link looks like it’s doing nothing at all – it’s just one of those things we don’t have to think about anymore.”