Masterpet unleashes data replication

Australia and New Zealand pet products company, Masterpet, has reduced nightly data replication exchanges between Wellington and Sydney from 40 minutes down to 22 since the introduction of data acceleration software.

The company’s 500 megabyte virtual machine (VM) replication process was taking a long time to complete because of an overloaded 5 Mbps wide area network (WAN) connection between New Zealand and Australia.

VM backups had saturated the link during 2012 as the company moved most of its servers to a virtual environment.

The company deployed Silver Peak software in early 2013 which improved WAN speed and allowed it to increase data replication volume to 1.6 gigabytes. This now takes 22 minutes to transfer.

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Australasia ICT manager Sean White said the improved transfer rate is helping the company meet its recovery point objective.

In addition to its data centres in Wellington and Sydney, the company has branch offices in Auckland and Christchurch which run a variety of applications over the WAN such as email, remote desktop sessions, Web and file sharing.

Masterpet also uses Veeam for its virtual replication.

“It is very easy to perform our Veeam backups now the WAN is working so efficiently,” said White in a statement. “We wanted something simple - we don’t need a lot of reporting or features, just something that sits there in the background and quietly makes our replication faster.”

He added that bandwidth savings means he will not need to increase the WAN link capacity as yet.

“Masterpet has gained significant productivity and we've improved the company’s ability to analyse data usage.”

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick