Community Health Plan Has Deployed Silver Peak

Silver Peak Systems announced that Community Health
Plan has deployed Silver Peak’s NX appliances to accelerate replication
between distributed iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) devices. By
accelerating the transfer of file, email and SQL traffic across the
WAN, Silver Peak enabled Community Health Plan to protect more data in
less time, improving business continuity while saving thousands of
dollars per month in IT expenditures.

Community
Health Plan averages 10 – 15 Gigabytes (GB) of traffic per hour over a
10 Megabits per second (Mbps) Internet VPN tunnel, the majority of
which is iSCSI traffic sent between distributed Compellent SAN devices.
Through synchronous data replication, each device acts as a warm
standby to the other for disaster recovery purposes.

“We
wanted all tier one data to be recoverable to within 60 minutes of
failure,” said Cary Dahl, IT manager at Community Health Plan. “Given
our volume of traffic, I knew that this could not be achieved without a
scalable WAN acceleration solution. Silver Peak was the natural choice
for our environment, and they have not disappointed.”

Community
Health Plan chose Silver Peak’s NX appliances for their ability to
perform disk based data reduction on large volumes of sustained traffic
over time. With up to seven TB of local data store, Silver Peak NX
appliances can eliminate over 95 percent of WAN traffic in a typical
enterprise environment. Community Health Plan, for example, is
transferring iSCSI traffic 3.5 times faster with Silver Peak, with 70
to 80 percent average data reduction across the organization’s WAN. The
organization is also using the IPsec capabilities of the Silver Peak
appliances to ensure that data always remains secure during the data
protection process.

“We would have
spent three times the money with our bandwidth provider to get the same
bandwidth we are getting from Silver Peak, “ added Dahl. “The savings
allowed us to change our DR strategy from a cold hosting service to a
hot standby site. In the end, we have a much better DR plan in place
for half the cost – who can argue with that ROI?

Community
Health Plan

Silver Peak Systems, Inc.