F5 Friday: CSG Case Study Shows Increased Performance, Less WAN Traffic With Dell and F5

When time and performance mattered, CSG Content Direct turned to Dell and F5 to make their replication faster while reducing WAN utilization.

We talk a lot in our blogs about what benefits you could get from an array of F5 products, so when this case study (pdf link) hit our inboxes, we thought you’d like to hear about what CSG’s Content Direct did get out of deploying F5 BIG-IP WOM. Utilizing tools by two of the premier technology companies in the world, Content Direct was able to decrease backup windows to as little as 5% of their previous time, and reduce traffic on the WAN significantly.

At the heart of the problem was WAN performance that was inhibiting their replication to a remote datacenter and causing them to fall further and further behind. Placing a BIG-IP WOM between their Dell EqualLogic iSCSI devices, Content Direct was able to improve performance to the point that they are now able to meet their RPOs and RTOs with room for expansion. Since Content Direct already deployed F5 BIG-IP LTM, they were able to implement this solution by purchasing and installing F5 BIG-IP WAN Optimization Manager (WOM) on the existing BIG-IP hardware, eliminating the need for new hardware.

The improvements that they saw while replicating iSCSI devices is in line with the improvements our testing has shown for NAS device replication also, making this case study a good examination of what you can expect from BIG-IP WOM in many environments. Since BIG-IP WOM supports a wide array of applications – from the major NAS vendors to the major database vendors – and includes offloading of encryption from overburdened servers, you can deploy it once and gain benefits at many points in your architecture.

If you are sending a lot of data between two datacenters, BIG-IP WOM has help for your overburdened WAN connection. Check out our White Papers and Solution Profiles relevant to BIG-IP WOM for more information about how it might help, and which applications have been tested for improvement measurements. Of course BIG-IP WOM works on IP connections, and as such can improve many more scenarios than we have tested or even could reasonably test, but those applications tested will give you a feel for the amount of savings you can get when deploying BIG-IP WOM on your WAN.

And if you are already a BIG-IP LTM customer, you can upgrade to include WOM without introducing a new device into your already complex network.

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