Netherlands ZLTO Deploys Silver Peak and EqualLogic

ZLTO is an association that handles
national relations for over 18,000 farmers across the Netherlands. With data
volumes on the rise, the association was having difficulty meeting its recovery
point objective (RPO) over the existing network infrastructure.

ZLTO deployed Silver Peak software, Inc.
with a Dell EqualLogic storage solution to accelerate its offsite replication
workloads cost-effectively and meet its five-minute RPO without upgrading the WAN infrastructure.

ZLTO has two Dell EqualLogic storage groups that are used as data stores for
the company’s VMware virtualized environment. The association runs all local
servers and applications from these SAN groups, with each location serving as a
failover site for the other in the case of an unexpected outage. ZLTO had been
allocating 20Mbps of a 50Mbps WAN for storage replication, which involves
starting a new auto-replication process every five minutes for six different
volumes in production. However, WAN bandwidth, distance and network quality
challenges were continually slowing the replication processes.

"Even
though the distance between our data center and DR site is not
terribly long, we were still having difficulty replicating between the two
locations," said Bart Haans, ICT manager for ZLTO. "The WAN link between our two locations did
not provide enough capacity to support rapid synchronization of all our volumes."

Silver Peak Virtual Acceleration Open
Architecture (VXOA) software works in concert with EqualLogic to overcome
common network challenges that hamper offsite replication. The Silver Peak
virtual solutions are known for scalability and performance, and run on every
major hypervisor-simplifying data center and offsite deployments. The result is
20x faster offsite replication on-average over the WAN.

"We
were able to install the solution simply by redirecting the traffic between the
EqualLogic arrays through the Silver Peak virtual appliance," said
Haans. "No changes to the network
were required, and we were up-and-running accelerating traffic in just a few
hours."

With Silver Peak, ZLTO reduced the amount
of bandwidth required for replication by 86%. In addition, it is able to move
almost 11TB of traffic over the existing WAN in a 24-hour period, helping the
association replicate all six of their production volumes in the desired
five-minute intervals.