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Blood Centers of the Pacific Chooses Silver Peak Systems to Increase Blood Donations
(Marketwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) SANTA CLARA, CA and SAN FRANCISCO, CA, October 15 / MARKET WIRE/ --
Silver Peak Systems
(www.silver-peak.com) today announced that Blood Centers of the Pacific
(BCP) (www.bloodcenters.org), a nonprofit organization that delivers more
than 130,000 pints of blood each year to more than 50,000 patients in need,
has deployed Silver Peak NX appliances to improve database transfers across
their Wide Area Network (WAN). By leveraging Silver Peak's advanced
network acceleration capabilities, BCP has dramatically reduced the time
and effort required to perform donor eligibility checks, saving the
organization money and enabling them to more effectively meet the enormous
demand for blood in the Northern California region.
"At a time when Bay Area blood supplies hover at critically low levels, we
need to do everything in our power to increase donations," said Lisa Bloch,
director of communications, Blood Centers of the Pacific. "In addition to
public appeals to raise awareness to the shortage, BCP has taken internal
measures to improve the efficiency with which we can react to the problem."
BCP identified WAN acceleration as a way of addressing one of its largest
IT challenges -- the routine download of database across their WAN. This
database, which is required to verify donor eligibility, is downloaded
weekly onto 50 laptops located on mobile units dispersed throughout
Northern California. The entire download process consumes several gigabytes
of WAN traffic, requiring each laptop to be handled serially. This takes
more than 100 hours to fully complete. Furthermore, parallel downloads
brought the network to a halt.
"Donor eligibility checking was a simple process but required most current
donor data down-loaded from the server to the mobile laptops with
encryptions built-in. The downloads required dedicated IT staff and
consumed expensive WAN bandwidth," said Sam Waran, regional director of IT,
Blood Centers of the Pacific. "More importantly, it impacted the
flexibility with which we could schedule donations. In our line of work,
that kind of bottleneck can actually cost lives."
After thorough testing and analysis, BCP chose Silver Peak to address its
WAN acceleration needs. Silver Peak Systems NX appliances were deployed in
the organization's main data center in San Francisco and in multiple remote
locations. The Silver Peak solution was chosen for its unique ability to
eliminate the transfer of duplicate data across the WAN, coupled with
various techniques for ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) and mitigating
latency and loss across the WAN. Once the Silver Peak Systems appliances
were in place, BCP routinely saw dramatic improvements, including a 10
times reduction in traffic across their WAN. This improved data transfers
significantly -- from more than one hour per laptop to less than 15
minutes. Additionally we were able to download these laptops in parallel.
With Silver Peak, BCP could more efficiently schedule its data downloads.
Seven laptops are now updated simultaneously, with downloads staggered
across multiple days. This eliminates the need for dedicated after-hour IT
personnel and improves operational efficiency as donation schedules are no
longer impacted by IT schedules.
Silver Peak provided the following added benefits in the BCP environment:
-- Protect Patient Information: Because Silver Peak leverages hardware
based 128 bit AES encryption, all patient information remains secure --
both at rest on Silver Peak NX appliances and across BCP's WAN. This is a
critical feature that enables BCP to comply with the Health Insurance
Patient Portability Act (HIPAA)
-- Reduce Expenditures: With 10 times data reduction, BCP is able to
avoid upsizing the WAN links to its branch locations. This translates to
approximately $100,000 per year in WAN bandwidth savings across all BCP
locations. In addition, BCP can more efficiently utilize scarce IT
resources for additional operational savings.
-- Improve application performance. Silver Peak's WAN acceleration
solution also improves the performance of BCP's file, email, and Voice Over
IP (VoIP) traffic. In addition, it improves the efficiency and reliability
of database backups that are occurring between BCP's main site in San
Francisco and a secondary site in Shasta.
"Silver Peak is the perfect complement to our WAN infrastructure," said
Waran. "By improving our ability to handle business operations across
distributed locations, the Silver Peak solution has become an essential
lifeline to BCP's business operations."
About Blood Centers of the Pacific
Blood Centers of the Pacific is
a nonprofit, community-based organization that provides blood and blood
components to hospitals, physicians and patients throughout Northern
California and conducts medical research to improve blood safety and
patient care. Blood Centers of the Pacific helps 50,000 patients every year
with blood donated by community volunteers.
A subsidiary of Blood Systems, the second largest blood collection
organization in the U.S., BCP is governed by a voluntary Board of
Directors. BCP's board represents community leaders in the fields of
medicine, business and civic service and is licensed by the Food and Drug
Administration.
About Silver Peak Systems, Inc.
Silver Peak improves backup,
replication and recovery between data centers and facilitates branch office
server and storage centralization by improving application performance
across the Wide Area Network (WAN). The company's award winning NX
appliances deliver exceptional performance improvements with unprecedented
security and scalability across all enterprise applications, including data
replication, backup, file transfers, email, web and real-time applications
such as Citrix and VoIP. For more information, visit
http://www.silver-peak.com/infocenter
NOTE: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, Network Memory and Silver
Peak NX Series are trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Marie Domingo
Silver Peak Systemsmdomingo@silver-peak.com
(408) 935-1898
(650) 888-5642 - mobile
Lisa Bloch
Blood Centers of the Pacificlbloch@bloodcenters.org
(415) 749-6612
Copyright ? 2008 Marketwire
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