Application Spotlight: Veeam
Virtualisation is changing the face of IT services and with it the very way a company needs to address its disaster recovery plans. Due to how virtualised resources can be moved about and quickly created from scratch to meet demand, a traditional “end of day” backup procedure simply cannot protect your servers as it once could.
To meet these changing DR needs, Veeam developed their Backup & Replication suite with image based replication of virtualised applications and machines to provide near-Continuous Data Protection (near-CDP) for VMWare based infrastructure, and soon to cover Hyper-V too. However, adding backup and replication services to a distributed network and their DR sites will place a substantial burden onto WAN infrastructure, restricting your replication windows and opens up further problems that often prove to be very costly to resolve and will only get worse the more services you run across your network. This is where WAN Optimisation from Sangfor can really deliver.
Rather than throwing expensive bandwidth at the problem and upgrading connections, our units can be installed into a business’s existing infrastructure at a fraction of the line cost and will employ compression and block level caching technologies to dramatically reduce the data transferred across a WAN link. This will greatly decrease transfer times, improve job rates and grants IT departments a greater degree of flexibility when it comes to their backup windows.
Don’t just take our word for it, we have customers who observed a 10 times reduction in their data transfer after installing our WAN optimisation units. In another case, a 20 fold reduction was achieved causing 86.04GB of data to be reduced to a mere 4.14GB even with the highest level of native compression, converting a replication job struggling to complete across their 10MB links with ~70ms latency into one that finished with time to spare.
A 20x reduction in data observed by a customer
By effectively trivialising the amount of data being exchanged and the time spent waiting for the transfer to complete, you can finally take advantage of the on-demand promises of virtualisation to create your own private cloud; quickly moving resources from one location to another and react to current levels of demand or even to get ahead of the curve and be ready for trending changes before they happen.
Choosing WAN optimisation from Sangfor will extend its benefits beyond your Veeam deployment too, since our units can accelerate all the other services and applications present on your network rather than tying your money up in licensing and equipment designed around improving only your Veeam traffic. Not only will you solve your backup problems but you can improve staff productivity across all departments and offices in your company.
Returning to disaster recovery, reducing the impact on your WAN has the potential to transform your once a day backups - often at the end of a working day – into tailored solutions to fit the service, be it multiple times per day/week/month or a continuous stream, finally allowing you to break through the old limitations on backup windows and reduce the mean time between jobs.
Application Spotlight: FalconStor NSS VA
FalconStor Network Storage Server Virtual Appliance (NSS VA) provides enterprise level virtualised storage, mirroring and replication to VMWare ESX based environments across corporate networks using the iSCSI protocol. The huge volumes of traffic generated by this process often requires capabilities to be scaled back to reduce the pressure on a companies' WAN infrastructure or expensive upgrades and dedicated communications hardware to realise its full benefit.
To see if WAN Optimisation from Sangfor could provide a low cost alternative solution, we decided to put our units to the test by pushing FalconStor NSS VA traffic as low as we could.
The Scenario
We created the scenario of a head office replicating two Windows 7 VMDK files from their main VMWare ESX server (10.10.1.194) to a backup server (10.10.34.10) across a 7Mb/s low latency WAN connection.
The Setup
To find out how effective Sangfor WAN Optimisation (WANO) is on the substantial volumes of traffic FalconStor NSS VA is capable of generating, we configured a test environment shown in the diagram above.
Each NSS VA v6.15 was set up with a simple 50GB virtual LUN, a 50GB snapshot disk and a replication disk. Native compression and encryption on the replication session was turned off and “continuous replication” mode enabled between the NSS VA's, allowing our WANO units full access to the raw data stream.
The Test
Setting up and installing the first Windows 7 guest OS on the ESX server running on IP 10.10.33.194/24 allowed us to perform what is known as a “first pass”, where data is seen for the first time by our unit and cached for subsequent requests, which means the majority of the optimisation occurs as a result of our iSCSI filter and compression algorithms.
From this first pass we observed data reduction rates of 50 to 60%, subsequent passes using a second Windows 7 guest OS could then take advantage of the cached data to improve these figures to between 80 to 90% of its original traffic. Over the course of this test, the FalconStor NSS VA would have transferred over 15GB of data; our WANO units reduced this to only 3.3GB for a final reduction rate of 78%.
The following images are the reports generated by our reporting module, showcasing the dramatic impact of the Sangfor WAN Optimisation unit on this stream of data.
Overall Data Reduction Graph
While the above chart shows just how effective our WANO unit was in reducing WAN traffic, the chart below really spells out the capability of the units caching abilities in driving down WAN utilisation over and above their protocol optimisation and packet compression abilities.
The Conclusion
Whether you are using FalconStor NSS VA to replicate your data to a central store/backup solution or to a DR site for business continuity, using WAN Optimisation from Sangfor will dramatically reduce the burden placed on your WAN infrastructure. This allows you to change the way you approach disaster recovery and high availability for your company without costly line upgrades or over provisioning “just in case”.
Independent Review Of Our Mid-Range Product
In this independent review of our mid-range product, the M5500, is put to the test to show how well our WAN Optimisation product performs in accelerating and optimising WAN traffic.
"The level of features provided is extensive and combining Sangfor's innovatve optimisation technologoes with its acceleration policies also makes the appliances highly versatile. There appears to be very little traffic it can't handle as Sangfor includes proxies for all popular applications and is also capable of accelerating site-to-site backups, IP SAN traffic and replication operations using products such as Double-Take."
We were especially pleased to hear this compliment:
"During testing we were impressed with the ease of installation and deployment of the M550 appliances. Sangfor's well designed management interface, wizard based assistance and comprehensive set of default parameters provided on the appliances allows WAN optimisation to begin almost immediately."
So don't just take our word for it, read the full review here.