Silver Peak extends replication performance over the WAN for new Dell Storage SC4000 Series

The new Dell Storage SC4000 Series arrays bring high-end storage capabilities to mid-sized deployments, offering all-flash performance for up to 72 percent lower costs than competing pure flash arrays. The enterprise-class arrays offer the same intelligent data placement capability as the Dell Compellent SC8000 that moves data among traditional rotating drives, write-optimised flash (SLC) and read-optimised flash (MLC) drives to optimise overall storage costs. When Silver Peak software is combined with the Dell Storage SC4000 Remote Instant Replay, companies can protect up to 20x more data over existing networks. Silver Peak complements SC4000 by reducing total cost of ownership and enabling customers to deploy over existing, lower cost networks like Internet/VPN in collaboration with Dell storage.
“Deployed with our Dell SC-Series Storage SAN-to-SAN replication, Silver Peak is enabling us to replicate up to four times the terabytes (TB) of data per day,” said Steve Borba, AVP and network security manager at Citizens Business Bank. “Silver Peak improved our usable bandwidth by more than 22x, providing headroom for future growth.”

The Dell Storage SC4000 Series can scale to more than 400 terabytes (TB) of raw capacity and can support a wide range of workloads. For example, the Dell Storage SC4020 can host up to 10,000 Microsoft Exchange 2013 user mailboxes in a single 2U SAN with 24 hard disk drives or can achieve nearly 120,000 IOPS (input-output operations per second) with less than one millisecond latency for OLTP or mixed workloads. With the addition of Silver Peak, remote replication throughput over the WAN can be increased to accommodate up to 2 TB/hr of replication capacity without having to upgrade the existing infrastructure, which extends capacity for future growth.

Silver Peak overcomes the common challenges that hamper offsite replication over shared WANs or the Internet, including limited bandwidth, distance and network quality. With Silver Peak’s simplified storage forwarding method, deployment takes less than 20 minutes and is done without complex network configuration changes. Administrators simply download and install Silver Peak software in the data centre and disaster recovery sites, point the Dell Storage arrays to Silver Peak, and in minutes start accelerating replication traffic.

In joint Silver Peak and Dell lab testing, the combined solution delivers 6x to 20x better replication performance on average compared to un-optimized replication environments. For example, on a 155 megabit-per-second (Mbps) shared network between Atlanta, Georgia and Dallas, Texas (40 milliseconds of latency), the time required to replicate a 20 GB dataset was reduced from 1.3 hours to 3 minutes.

“Silver Peak continues to build on its status as a Dell global partner for WAN optimisation by providing Dell Storage users performance over the WAN that is equivalent to a dedicated, low-latency link,” said Marc Trimuschat, vice president of alliances and the Dell relationship for Silver Peak. “By combining Silver Peak data acceleration software with the new Dell Storage SC4000 Series, enterprises can easily meet their RPOs, lower disaster recovery costs, and extend distances between replication sites using their existing WAN infrastructure.”