United Drug Opts for Silver Peak Systems

Silver
Peak Systems, Inc., a specialist in accelerating data over distance, has been
selected by United Drug PLC, an international healthcare service provider, to
improve offsite data replication and assist in transferring large volumes of
data between the company’s Dublin headquarters and other distributed data
centers and remote offices.

By deploying Silver Peak’s WAN
acceleration software at nine company locations, United Drug has improved its
DR operations, enhanced employee collaboration, and avoided a substantial
bandwidth upgrade that is saving the company more than €30,000 a year in IT
costs.

United Drug uses EMC RecoverPoint as a component for their DR plans. Network issues were preventing
replication processes from taking place between the company’s main site in
Dublin, a second production site in Belfast, as well as to a new dedicated DR
site in Dublin. As such, United Drug was under pressure to build an IT
infrastructure that would reduce costs, improve flexibility, and ensure better
DR compliance.

United Drug turned to IT infrastructure
reseller Comsys for a solution that would maximize replication throughput over
the WAN while simultaneously accelerating the performance of other business applications.

"As
our business grows and demands on the IT department change, it is increasingly
essential that we optimize our network in order to improve our DR operations
and cope with increasing end user needs," said Tim Buckley, group IT
director at United Drug. "In order
to do this, we need a high-capacity solution that solves network quality and
latency issues for a wide range of traffic. Silver Peak has a clear advantage
on these fronts, plus they are a highly-flexible solution that takes just
minutes to deploy."

Since deploying Silver Peak, United Drug is
able to replicate 20TB of data between the two Dublin sites, enabling the
company to meet its RPO. In addition, it has improved the performance
of all other applications to remote sites, such as file, email and web. It has also been able to avoid costly bandwidth upgrades in the process. It
can now use its 100Mbps connection more effectively, eliminating the need to
upgrade to a 1Gbps connection, saving the company tens-of-thousands of euros
per year in telecommunications expenses.

United Drug chose to deploy the Silver Peak
VRX virtual appliances at their central data centers, with smaller Silver Peak
virtual and physical appliances deployed at several remote sites. Using
real-time optimization techniques, the solution overcomes common
bandwidth, latency, and quality issues that plague most WAN environments.

"We
are delighted that United Drug has been able to enjoy such tangible results
from the Silver Peak solution," said Ben McGahon, MD at Comsys. "While many companies resort to throwing
bandwidth at their network problems, United Drug took a more holistic approach,
resulting in better overall performance and substantial cost savings."