Carnival Australia Invests in Improved IT Productivity and Reduces IT Costs by Optimizing Ship-to-Ship and Ship-to-Shore Satellite WAN With Silver Peak WAN Optimization

Satellite wide area network (WAN) connections are plagued with bandwidth limitations, latency, and packet loss. Carnival Australia solved these challenges by optimizing its satellite WAN connectivity with Silver Peak data center class WAN optimization appliances for three of its ships in the P&O Cruises Australia fleet.

The ships Pacific Dawn, Pacific Jewel, and Pacific Pearl rely on the satellite WAN to access applications, transfer files, and communicate between ships and the head office data center located in Sydney. To overcome slow WAN performance over the 756 Kbps IP-based satellite connections, Carnival Australia deployed Silver Peak NX-series WAN optimization appliances on ships and in the data center to accelerate CIFS and FTP for file transfers, HTTP/S for Internet traffic, RDP for remote administration, and IBM Lotus Notes and Domino for messaging and collaboration. This improved staff efficiencies, eliminated IT frustrations from applications frequently hanging, and accelerated the previously long file transfers and data replication scenarios. The Silver Peak deployment has also ruled out the need for a costly upgrade in satellite WAN bandwidth.

“Silver Peak is a very good fit for our unique environment that spans both land and sea,” said Carnival Australia’s IT director. “Silver Peak’s innovative WAN acceleration solutions improve our ability to streamline our business and IT operations, both on and off our ships. Silver Peak has been a great partner to work with, and their data center class WAN optimization has proved very useful in improving IT efficiencies and ruling out added costs for WAN bandwidth.”

The Silver Peak WAN optimization appliances reduce the packet loss and significantly improve the reliability of satellite connections. Carnival Australia selected Silver Peak based on industry-leading scale, ease-of-use, and unique ability to optimize all traffic and applications over the company’s satellite WAN infrastructure. Carnival Australia benefits from Silver Peak’s unique features that include Network Acceleration to overcome WAN latency, Network Integrity to correct packet delivery issues and intelligently allocate WAN resources, and Network Memory™ to maximize WAN bandwidth utilization.

Silver Peak product capabilities are complemented by Silver Peak AutoSupport, which helps speed problem-resolution, helps avoids errors, and improves overall satisfaction with the products without human intervention. This is especially important for businesses such as Carnival Australia where there is limited time for servicing IT equipment on-board ships involved in busy cruise itineraries.