Customer Stories

posted on 15 May 2008 16:36

AutoDesk, the supplier of the AutoCAD software whose new version files Riverbed had such trouble accelerating, is a Silver Peak WAN acceleration customer.

Its 100 world-wide sites are all going to have Silver Peak NX-series wide area data services (WADS) products installed to accelerate their inter-office WAN traffic. Some of the links run at more than 10Mbit/s and files larger than 4GB can be sent across them.

AutDesk has a roster of some 70 applications that must have their WAN access accelerating, including SharePoint, AutoDesk builds, AutoCAD, MS Office, SAP and more. Some of them, such as Aspera, use UDP and not TCP as their network protocol.

This means that WADS products that dedupe network traffic at the TCP layer cannot dedupe and hence accelerate Aspera or other UDP traffic such as voice and video.

The Silver Peak NX technology deduplicates at the IP network layer, above TCP or UDP, and can dedupe any lower-level traffic. The product looks for byte-level patterns in incoming data streams and replaces repetitive patterns with reference pointers to greatly reduce the amount of data sent across the WAN.

The original byte patterns are stored in the NX product's direct-attached disk drives and incoming byte sequences are compared to them.

Autodesk has 33 of its offices equipped with Silver Peak products so far and more are going to be installed. The deal was won by Silver Peak in late 2007 and Silver Peak was chosen over Riverbed and others.

The reasons included Silver Peak's better ablity to accelerate traffic over high speed links such as OC12 (50Mbit/s), hardware (and thus wire-speed) encryption, and its network integrity features handling lost and out-of-order packets.

AutoDesk experienced a 78 percent increase in FTP performance through using the Silver Peak products, plus a terrific 97 percent improvement in NetApp SnapMirror traffic speed, and an 84 percent increase in Aspera network speed.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}