Pancetera + Riverbed = VM Mobility Across the WAN with Mind-blowing Performance
Moving virtual machines across the WAN is painful if not impossible for most customers today.
Virtualizing servers and desktops has become the corporate standard in the past few years. However, the advantages of virtualization haven’t been fully exploited in ROBO (Remote Office/Branch Office) environments.
Companies still struggle with the daily operational changes related to
- Configuring VMs in the datacenter and pushing them to a ROBO
- Backing them up every night to the datacenter
- Replicating them to a Disaster Recovery site
- Taking advantage of the emerging Cloud Storage and Private Cloud Resource offerings
Pancetera Unite + Riverbed = VM WAN Mobility
Virtualization and WAN acceleration haven't really intersected, mainly because the protocols that could be used to move VMs across the WAN cannot be effectively accelerated.
Today backing, copying or moving VMs across a WAN cause a tremendous burden on WANs with extremely high costs, and cannot be scaled effectively to remote sites.
Pancetera Unite unleashes the potential of virtualization and WAN acceleration in ROBOs and Clouds.
The Pancetera Unite Virtual Appliance combines the power of virtualization with the power of the Riverbed Steelhead to bring a new era in IT management of ROBOs and Cloud Computing.
Pancetera allows you to perform migration of live virtual machines across the WAN.
Pancetera’s patented SmartRead™ technology, works out-of-the-box with Riverbed Steelhead to achieve previously-unseen improvements in compression with no performance impact on the live VMs. In addition Pancetera’s SmartView technology presents all your VMs, across multiple hypervisors, as a unified file system and serve them up as CIFS or NFS share - protocols that are accelerated by Riverbed Steelhead. This allow you move VMs:
- That are Live!
- Without expensive replication software – simply drag and drop.
- Without using the VMware vCenter Converter
- Without proprietary storage hardware
- Across different storage devices on different networks
Unprecedented Performance Improvements
Test results show a dramatic reduction of up to 95% of the time it takes to move a Virtual Machine across a WAN; this means going from 200 to 13 minutes to copy a 8 Gb VM on a 10 Mbps link with 140ms roundtrip latency.
Pancetera + Riverbed = VM WAN Mobility Across the WAN
This is an extremely significant reduction in WAN bandwidth utilization, that will allow System Administrators to finally do things like keeping all their VM templates in the data center (having the ROBOs pull them through whenever a new VM needs to be created), backing up their ROBO VMs to the data center at any time of the day with no performance impact (as well as restoring it with the same high performance), applying Disaster Recovery policies without outrageous software and bandwidth costs and take advantage to cheap Cloud Storage and Public Cloud compute resources.
A dedicated OC-3 line of 155 Mbps with Pancetera and Riverbed Steelhead will perform better than an OC-12 of 622 Mbps line at a quarter of the cost. Savings of $500,000+ per year provide a near instant ROI.
The benefits -- especially for 24/7 organizations -- are tremendous, and previously impossible.
Typical Deployment Architecture
Pull Scenario
The illustration above shows a “pull” scenario. Pancetera Unite is installed in the Branch Office and VMs are being “pulled” from the Branch Office to the Data Center for central backup or maintenance.
Push Scenario
The illustration above shows a “push” scenario. Pancetera Unite is installed in the Data Center and VMs are being “pushed” from the Data Center to the Branch or Private Cloud Provider for deployment or DR.
VM Mobility Deployment Benefits
Deploying Pancetera along with your Riverbed Steelhead provides dramatic benefits, including:
Improved Productivity - By accelerating migration of Virtual Machines, backups, restores, and other VM operations, customer and start taking advantage of emerging Cloud Storage and Private and Public Cloud Resources and spend less time deploying and managing new virtual servers.
Reduced WAN Impact and Costs - Other WAN-dependent, mission-critical applications perform much better when the WAN is no longer congested by intensive VM operations traffic. By dramatically reducing this traffic (up to 95%) IT managers can also avoid bandwidth upgrades – or in fact achieve some significant costs savings by reducing the existing bandwidth with no negative impact to users; reducing an OC-12 to an OC-3 can save up to $500,000 a year.
Consolidate Storage - Storage can now realistically be consolidated in data centers, with less storage necessary at ROBOs. VM templates can be kept in the Data Center, Backups can be performed to the Data Center – all using your existing Storage and Backup solutions and eliminating the need to pay for extremely expensive and difficult to manage new software solutions.
