OK. The title of this article is an obscure reference to an old Cole Porter song. And I know it’s a stretch. But hang in there with me.

Have you ever watched a flock of birds migrate in the fall or salmon swim upstream to spawn? It’s amazing to witness. I’m always in awe, wondering how it is that birds and fish travel thousands of miles and arrive in the same destination each year. While I find it amazing, I’m also convinced that this migration is guided by something beyond the birds and fish. Now, strange as it may seem, this example has brought me to the subject of data migration and the role of WAN optimization. Of course! Why wouldn’t it?

If you are responsible for managing data storage, wouldn’t you want to set up your network easily and intuitively to support the migration of data? This is especially true as data is moved to far-away data centers — or into the cloud where network performance can severely limit data throughput. Well, that’s exactly what you can do with Silver Peak’s virtual WAN optimization appliances.

Easing the dangers of data migration

There is no doubt that when birds and fish migrate, there are obvious perils and dangers along the way. You’ve also probably seen television programs showing the dangers that water buffaloes face during their migrations. Much in the same way that animals have a driving need to migrate, businesses also have their driving forces for migrating data. Whatever the reasons, there are many challenges that come with migrating data. A couple of obvious examples come to mind: migrating data over networks can be excruciatingly slow, and data can get lost or compromised when sent between locations.

The good news is, just as WAN optimization has proven to improve branch office applications, it also helps avoid many of the risks and costs associated with data migration. Virtual WAN optimization solutions help by moving data faster and more efficiently by de-duping and compressing it, mitigating network latency through protocol acceleration, improving data quality by using Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Packet Order Correction (POC) to overcome dropped and out-of-order packets, and securing data with advanced encryption technologies.

Virtualization makes it especially easy to provision high-capacity WANop technology in support of time-sensitive data migration projects. By supporting any hypervisor, Silver Peak WAN optimization can be deployed in any data center or service provider environment — and on any platform (including routers, switches, servers, blades and storage arrays).  With subscription-based pricing, WANop can be decommissioned at the end of a short-term data migration project, or it can cost-effectively remain in place to support ongoing strategic projects, including data replication. Finally, Silver Peak is the only vendor to support Gbps WAN capacity within a single virtual WANop appliance, making it the ideal solution for large data transfers that accompany many migration projects.

Thomson Snell & Passmore, a UK-based law firm, is a good example of a company that benefited from using Silver Peak’s WAN optimization products to migrate data from their regional offices to a new public cloud offering. The time it took to move data into the cloud was significantly reduced from three and a half weeks to just three days with Silver Peak, saving the company considerable time, resources, and money.

What do you think? Are you ready to heed these examples from nature – and do it? Take advantage of the benefits WAN optimization can bring to your migration initiatives.