[December 12, 2012]

United Drug Meets Recovery Point Objectives and Lowers Disaster Recovery Costs with Silver Peak

Silver Peak Systems, the leader in accelerating data over distance, has been selected by United Drug, a leading 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 (News - Alert) wide area network (WAN) acceleration software at nine company locations, United Drug has improved its disaster recovery (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.

• Watch the United Drug video: http://blog.silver-peak.com/united-drug-meets-rpo-reduces-disaster-recovery-costs-video

United Drug uses EMC RecoverPoint as a strategic 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 great pressure to build an IT infrastructure that would reduce costs, improve flexibility and ensure better DR compliance.

United Drug turned to leading IT infrastructure reseller Comsys (News - Alert) for a solution that would maximize replication throughput over the WAN, while simultaneously accelerating the performance of other business critical 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 has been able to replicate 20 terabytes (TB) of data between the two Dublin sites, enabling the company to meet its recovery point objective (RPO). In addition, United Drug has improved the performance of all other applications to remote sites, such as file, email and web. United Drug has also been able to avoid costly bandwidth upgrades in the process. It can now use its 100 megabit-per-second (Mbps) connection more effectively, eliminating the need to upgrade to a 1 Gbps 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 its central data centers, with smaller Silver Peak virtual and physical appliances deployed at several remote sites. Using real-time optimization techniques, the Silver Peak 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, managing director 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."

Additional Resources

• Read the WAN Speak blog
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• Watch Silver Peak videos on YouTube
• Connect with Silver Peak on LinkedIn

About Silver Peak Systems

Silver Peak software accelerates data between data centers, branch offices and the cloud. The company's software-defined acceleration solves network quality, capacity and distance challenges to provide fast and reliable access to data anywhere in the world. Leveraging its leadership in data center class wide area network (WAN) optimization, Silver Peak is a key enabler for strategic IT projects like virtualization, big data and disaster recovery. Download Silver Peak software today at silver-peak.com/marketplace.

Note: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, and Silver Peak VXOA are all trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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