A U.S. branch of Toshiba was having trouble finishing off backup data runs over its fully meshed T-3 network because of latency over long distances, but solved the problem using WAN acceleration gear.

The equipment made by Silver Peak has enabled Toshiba America Electronic Components to cut the bandwidth it buys on some of the links from 45Mbps to 20Mbps, a savings that will pay for the equipment in 14 months, says Leon Roberge, IT director of information systems for the company.

The company has design centers in Bloomington, Minn., San Diego, Calif., San Jose, Calif., and Marlborough, Mass., as well as headquarters in Irvine, Calif., connected by the T-3s. It has a Chicago sales site connected to the network via a T-1 that is also fully meshed with the other sites.

Roberge says Toshiba installed Silver Peak NX gear at all the sites and set up a set of fully meshed optimization tunnels, so all traffic among all the sites gets optimized. (Compare products)

The NX devices at opposite ends of WAN connections optimize traffic in a variety of ways to give better response times. These methods include TCP optimization, compression, and caching of data patterns at the far end of connections so the same patterns don’t have to be sent over and over.

Initially the company wanted to boost performance over long distances where unavoidable latency was an issue, says Roberge, such as the link between Marlborough, Mass., and San Jose, Calif. Tuning TCP window size with the Silver Peak devices helps most over very long distances, but it and the other optimization methods have also helped on shorter runs, he says.

The company has put a Silver Peak box in its Chicago sales office as well, which has less traffic and is fed by a T-1. That line was filling up as the company started replicating its IBM/Lotus Notes data to company headquarters in Irvine, Calif., Roberge says. He could have bought more bandwidth, but that would have been a continuing added expense, he says.

At each site, the Silver Peak box is placed between a switch and the WAN router so all traffic in and out of the site flows through it. "It's not just the engineering data, it's all of our data," he says. Traffic includes access to Oracle data bases and passing CIFS traffic.