High bandwidth OC12 WAN links that provide up to 622 Mbps throughput are utilized by a number of enterprises as a critical means of disaster recovery, Packeteer of Cupertino, California said. As much as 97 percent of OC12 bandwidth routinely goes unused, however, during disaster recovery and back up data transfers due to the severe performance impact caused by latency, the company said.
By overcoming performance-threatening latency and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) constraints to reclaim wasted bandwidth, the SkyX Accelerator 750 can increase data transfer speeds over large WAN links by up to 200 times depending on WAN latency levels, Packeteer added.
The need for accelerated application and storage back up over WAN links has become as critical as the high speed delivery of these applications to the remote workforce, according to research firm, IDC of Framingham, Massachusetts. It is becoming common to have to transfer terabytes of data to remote back up sites, which can take hours to complete, and is unacceptable for disaster recovery where every second counts, it added. Packeteer is delivering a WAN acceleration solution that enables storage and networking professionals to meet the real time performance requirements of current disaster recovery initiatives, IDC said.
With disaster recovery processes at or near the top of IT priorities, most enterprises maintain redundant data centers to improve the continuity of their business in the case of critical IT failures or external disasters, Packeteer said. The large, high capacity WAN links that are used to transfer bulk data are often underutilized due to latency and TCP protocol constraints that severely impact throughput and data transfer speeds, the company said. The majority of this bandwidth is simply wasted because TCP "chattiness" forces applications to wait for acknowledgements to confirm that data, traversing latency-sensitive WAN connections, has been sent, it added. For example, TCP limitations on a 622 Mbps OC12 WAN link with 25 ms latency could cripple the transmission rate of a critical application backup to 20.5 Mbps, leaving 97 percent of the network link unused while severely dragging down data transfer times, Packeteer added.
By employing protocol acceleration techniques that address WAN latency, Packeteer's SkyX Accelerator 750 enables data transfers that fully utilize the available bandwidth on high performance OC12 WAN links to accelerate data at rates up to 622 Mbps, Packeteer said. For a typical regional OC12 WAN link with 25ms of latency, a 100 GB (gigabytes) back up process which normally takes 11 hours can now be reduced to 26 minutes with the SkyX Accelerator 750, the company said. This boost in data back up speeds results in a 25X performance advantage over native high performance WAN connections, it added. Likewise, a transcontinental link with 200ms of latency can also realize up to a 200X performance boost with the SkyX Accelerator 750 solution, Packeteer added.
With its SkyX Accelerator 750, Packeteer is establishing new industry performance benchmarks for disaster recovery and back up, the company said. A major roadblock to optimizing the back up process has been slow data transfer speeds due to TCP chattiness and WAN latency over high capacity links, it added. The SkyX Accelerator 750 removes these roadblocks so that organizations can reach the accelerated, high capacity data transfer speeds that disaster recovery applications demand, Packeteer added.
The SkyX Accelerator 750 is available in both 311 Mbps and 622 Mbps configurations, Packeteer said. The list price for the SkyX Accelerator 750 311 Mbps appliance is US$ 52,000, while the list price for the SkyX Accelerator 750 622 Mbps appliance is US$ 60,000, the company said. Current SkyX Accelerator 750 customers can upgrade to the high performance points, and the pricing would depend upon current licensed capacity, Packeteer added.
