My company has a situation in which we have 2 sites which are connected by a 200Mbps metro-ethernet connection. The hand-off is a Gigabit port, but the service provider limits it to our subscribed rate of 200 Mbps.

We're moving large database dumps over this line very often. The database dumps compress extremely well (10:1 or more with GZIP).

We are looking for a solution for doing compression at the network level instead of the system level to conserve on replication time and CPU load on the servers.

We have looked very deeply into options for block-level replication with synchronous replaction. That is probably the best long-term option, but right now we just can't make that change. We need a solution for the next 2 years that does not involve changing our replication scheme or our storage scheme.

We've tried Cisco's WAAS product, and while we were impressed with it's abilities, the latency it adds to perform it's optimization was so large that it made the replication times much, much worse than just doing the copy directly over the link.

So, we're looking for different options, perhaps something ASIC-driven instead of the 'software' driven WAAS. Has anyone had any experience using a pair of routers with VPN/Compression modules on a line this high-speed? I'm thinking of a 7206VXR with an NPE-G2 and a VSA on it. The VSA data sheet says it'll do 950Mbps throuput, but I'm wondering if anyone has put that to the test.

The ultimate goal here is to make replication times faster over the link. The secondary goal is to also possibly turn off the GZIP of the database dumps, and just allow the network to 'compress' the data over the link.

any insight?