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PERFORMANCE BRIEF
Optimizing EMC Celerra for WAN Replication
EMC Celerra Replicator – Advanced IP Storage Protection
EMC Celerra Replicator, part of the Celerra product family, provides efficient, asynchronous
data replication over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. With Celerra Replicator, you can
create point-in-time, NAS file system copies and consistent iSCSI LUN copies at remote
sites. These capabilities enable you to create a disaster recovery capability and use
networked storage resources more efficiently while keeping your remote copy and
production data accessible at all times.
Multi-site Replication
As many large enterprises, CIOs are making the strategic choice to protect as much of their
critical data as possible. The drivers include a basic need for data protection, compliance,
and disaster recovery. It is much easier to recover information quickly if it is replicated to
one or more highly secure remote locations instead of local backups/replication options. In
addition, efficient data replication reduces costs, improves manageability, while enabling
higher service levels. Cost effective, long distance replication is often a necessity, both for
physical and virtual environments.
The Problem: Poor Performance Hurts Data Protection
Bandwidth constraints and high latency often results in poor replication performance and
missed backup windows. When WANs are involved, file distribution and data backup
applications work poorly or not at all. In addition, the replication traffic may also end up
competing for WAN resources with other applications results in overall poor performance
for critical enterprise applications. Purchasing more bandwidth is expensive, and doesn’t
necessarily give better results if latency is not addressed.
DEPLOYMENT BENEFITS
With Riverbed, you can enjoy a number of
valuable benefits for your EMC Celerra NAS
storage:
• Acceleration of file sharing. Improve end
user productivity and collaboration with
quicker file sharing across the enterprise.
• Acceleration of Celerra Replicator
operations. Speed up data replication
between EMC Celerra NAS file servers.
• Dramatic reduction of site-to-site
replication time and WAN traffic. Protect
data more frequently with faster operations,
reducing the risk of data loss.
• Increased capacity of existing WAN
links. Defer bandwidth upgrades and the
ongoing operating expense by getting more
from your current network.
The Solution: Riverbed Steelhead Appliances
Riverbed delivers great improvements in meeting your recovery point (RPO), recovery time (RTO), and service level agreement (SLA)
objectives, enabling you to protect more data in less time, and recover faster across the WAN. The Steelhead appliances perform a
number of optimizations for the data transfers including data streamlining (removing redundant bytes over the WAN), TCP protocol
optimization (addressing chattiness and overcoming latency, and a variety of adaptively tuneable options for compression and data
reduction.
Typical Steelhead Appliance and EMC Celerra Deployment Architecture
PERFORMANCE BRIEF: EMC Celerra
In addition to reducing WAN utilization, the Steelhead appliance includes extensive
Hierarchical Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities to ensure that Celerra traffic receives
the appropriate guaranteed level of WAN bandwidth and latency. This provides the
Celerra traffic with priority access to the network infrastructure required to ensure
consistent performance and maintain RPO/RTO targets. Challenging network
environments may also employ the Steelhead’s MX-TCP option which ensures that the
desired WAN throughputs are maintained even in the event of network impairments
such as packet loss caused by network congestion.
TESTING PARAMETERS
The EMC Celerra Replicator was tested with an
NS-480 and an NS-120 connecting through two
Riverbed Steelhead 5050-H appliances running
RiOS 5.5. These were configured to use SDR
Adaptive, MX-TCP, multi-core load balancing,
and adaptive compression.
Steelhead appliances have been qualified by EMC as approved WAN optimization
solutions for EMC Celerra, giving you confidence in adopting the solution. EMC and its
channel partners also resell Riverbed products via the EMC Select program.
The performance tests were run on simulated
WAN links with latency of 80ms. The WAN
bandwidth was fixed at 45 Mbps. A consistent
1.6 GB data set was replicated.
This testing has shown improvements in the throughput performance of EMC Celerra
Replicator data transfers by as much as 545%, more than 5X faster than the same
operation when performed on an un-optimized WAN connection, increasing from an
average of 36 Mbps to 196 Mbps throughput. In addition, bandwidth requirements
were greatly improved, with reductions from 70% up to 99% of WAN traffic, compared
to uncompressed, undeduplicated replication of the same data.
A “Cold Operation” is defined as a data transfer
that has never been seen by the Steelhead
appliance before (completely new data).
Test Results: Increased Average Throughput (Shown in Mbps)
A “Warm Operation” is defined as a
subsequent data transfer in which the
Steelhead appliance has seen most or all of the
data before (an incremental change or data
that has been used by another application
across the WAN).
A customer’s story:
“ Today HNTB has over 120 TB’s of data on a single Celerra system. Most of this is data replicated from the
remote offices using Riverbed WAN optimization. Before implementing WAN optimization HNTB routinely had
delays of days and in some cases weeks in getting data replicated. After implementation these delays virtually
disappeared. . Our users have been extremely happy to have this secondary copy of data quickly available to
them. With the Riverbed in place they have found this a very usable solution to continue working, while preRiverbed implementation it was almost unusable.” - Wes Owen, HNTB
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common
IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility – all while eliminating the need to
increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more
responsive. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com
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