Aussie P&O leads way on WAN optimiser

P&O cruise ship owner Carnival Australia has rolled out Silver Peak WAN optimisation on three of its cruise ships that operate out of Sydney.

The company has installed two Silver Peak NX-series WAN optimisation appliances (one main and one back-up) on the Pacific Dawn, the Pacific Jewel and the Pacific Pearl, as well as in its datacentre in North Sydney, to tackle problems with data throughput for its 756Kbps IP-based satellite connections.

This problem was being caused by latency, packet loss, out-of-order packets and satellite connection network jitter. Applications were having to continually re-transmit, because there was 5 per cent packet loss on the link.

The implementation was intended to improve CIFS and FTP for file transfers, HTTP/S for internet traffic, RDP for remote administration and IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. According to Carnival Australia, this has increased staff efficiency, and has reduced the time for file transfers.

"The Silver Peak WAN optimisation appliances reduced the packet loss, and significantly improved the reliability of the satellite connections," Carnival Australia said, adding that it chose Silver Peak because of its ability to optimise all traffic and applications over the WAN infrastructure.

The company particularly praised the product's AutoSupport system, which helped resolve problems without human intervention, enabling the company to keep to its cruise itinerary without having to spend excessive amounts for time servicing IT equipment.

It will be putting appliances into its New Zealand datacentre within the next three months, and will be looking into whether it would be viable for more ships in the global P&O fleet to adopt the technology, according to Silver Peak.