FABC

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.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Marie Domingo
Silver Peak Systems
mdomingo@silver-peak.com
(408) 935-1898
(650) 888-5642 - mobile


Lisa Bloch
Blood Centers of the Pacific
lbloch@bloodcenters.org
(415) 749-6612

SOURCE: Silver Peak Systems

mailto:mdomingo@silver-peak.com
mailto:lbloch@bloodcenters.org

The $75,000 sponsorship will help fund ABC education and operations research to ensure a safe and reliable blood supply nationally.

"It is very comforting to have the support of Octapharma," said FABC Chairman David Allen. "The Foundation is truly grateful to Octapharma for their financial support. This support will help to ensure that blood centers across the nation will continue to save lives by providing a safe and reliable blood supply."

"Octapharma has been a steadfast partner of America's Blood Centers for close to ten years," said ABC President Donald Doddridge. "We applaud Octapharma's generous gift of $75,000 to further support the blood donor and patient initiatives of the Foundation for America's Blood Centers."

Thousands of people each day require healthcare therapies that are manufactured from plasma and hundreds to thousands of plasma donations are needed to serve each patient's annual therapy needs. Plasma is the source of over 1,000 proteins, many of which are used for drug development and therapeutic purposes. These proteins include albumin, clotting factors, and intravenous immunoglobulin.

Foundation for America's Blood Centers

The Foundation for America's Blood Centers supports public education and increases awareness about the need and importance of volunteer blood donation. The Foundation is a 501(c)(3) affiliate of America's Blood Centers. Founded in 1962, America's Blood Centers is North America's largest network of community-based blood programs. Member blood banks provide half of the United States, and all of Canada's volunteer donor blood supply. For more information, please e-mail the foundation at fabc@americasblood.org or call 202-654-2982.

Octapharma

Octapharma is the largest privately owned plasma products company in the world. Its core business is the development, production and sale of high quality, virus safe plasma derivatives, including intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG). In the U.S., Octapharma's IVIG product, octagam(R) (immune globulin intravenous [human] 5%), is used to treat disorders of the immune system, and Octapharma's Albumin (Human) is indicated for the restoration and maintenance of circulating blood volume. Based in Lachen Switzerland, Octapharma employs over 2000 people in 27 countries, including the United States, where Octapharma USA is headquartered in Hoboken, N.J. For more information, please visit www.octapharma.com or call 201-604-1130.

SOURCE Octapharma

http://www.octapharma.com