n By Paul Desmond
When you’re transferring large files between the United States and Japan, you have to allow for a certain amount of delay, especially when your connection maxes out at 100Mbps. But the situation in which Panasonic Research & Development found itself was extreme, with many file transfers measured in hours, not minutes.
That all changed when the company implemented WAN acceleration appliances. Files that previously took hours now shoot overseas in a few minutes. Subsequent transfers of the same file may take just seconds, because only the changes get transferred, according to Iben Rodriguez, a consultant with Panasonic R&D.
Rodriguez, who works for the consulting firm Arcscale in Santa Clara, Calif., but spends most of his time with Panasonic, spoke about his WAN acceleration project at the recent Network World IT Roadmap event in Santa Clara and in a follow-up interview (available here via podcast). His implementation of SilverPeak WAN acceleration appliances sped up file transfers so dramatically that it required engineers in Japan and the United States to change the workflows they use to do business, taking what used to be a serial process and making it more interactive.
The Panasonic R&D unit where Rodri-
guez works, Panasonic Emerging Advanced
RF Laboratory (PEARL), designs integrated
circuits and has engineers in two main locations: the company headquarters in Santa Clara and in Japan. The process typically involves a design engineer coming up with an idea, which may be put into a large file with lots of calculations, then into a simulation environment. Engineers then design the circuits, lay them out on a chip and run multiple mathematical simulations to ensure the circuits perform correctly, with no interference.
For Panasonic R&D, each of those steps routinely involves files of 2GB or more going back and forth between the United States and Japan. The company had a 100Mbps VPN running between the two sites, but it still took hours to transfer the files, Rodriguez says. Engineers would often send files at the end of their day, leaving them for their overseas counterparts to pick up at the beginning of their next day, make changes, and send back.
In addition to being slow, that routine cre-
ated problems with file versions, Rodriquez says. An engineer in Japan might be working on a day-old file while another in Santa Clara was working on a newer file.“Mistakes were made and we had some setbacks that we wanted to eliminate,” he says.
The company looked a number of potential solutions, including gigabit Internet connections in both Santa Clara and Japan, all of which were cost-prohibitive. That’s when Rodriguez started investigating WAN acceleration. After researching the various options, he decided the best fit would be an appliance that could cache files at each end and apply network acceleration and compression techniques. The device also had to have good security, including support for secure tunnels, encryption of files stored on its disk and a secure management interface. And it had to be able to handle terabytes of data going back and forth.
After looking at market share numbers and talking to references, Panasonic opted to do a proof of concept with just one vendor:
References:
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