DEK sees massive bandwidth acceleration with Riverbed appliance

"After running the figures we realised that we were looking at a very quick ROI and a total saving of around $480,000 over six years," states Steve Sheriff, DEK's global infrastructure manager. "It was a ringing endorsement of just how positive an investment this was for our company." Sheriff explains that DEK had been suffering from sluggish WAN performance, due in part to application-level and TCP 'chattiness' and the sheer cost of continually expanding its bandwidth. Business critical ERP transactions, for example, were taking up to six seconds per keystroke, and there were issues with applications such as Lotus Notes. The bottom line: WAN pipe capacity would have had to double every three years, alongside local server installations, to sustain traffic and ensure ensure optimal productivity and workflow, he says. Hence the decision to go for a new WAN architecture and use de-duplication technology to streamline the data flow, using Steelhead appliances from Riverbed. "Our sister company had already presented its Riverbed solution to the rest of the group a couple of years ago, so we knew it was tried, tested and worked for them. We detailed our security hardware reseller Epic Net with the name of the vendor, and they approached them on our behalf." That led to Riverbed UK VAD (value added distributor) Zycko, which replicated file transfers and mirrored DEK's network conditions, quickly reducing transfer times from seven minutes to three, and then seconds, during trials. Sheriff says he was so impressed that he went for a 30-day trial of the Riverbed solution. Zycko pre-configured the units with DEK and Epic Net, and the manufacturer's infrastructure team then installed Steelhead appliances at its offices in Zurich, Switzerland, Weymouth, UK, and Shenzhen, China. "File transfers between the UK, Switzerland and China were considerably faster: the time taken to transfer a large file dropped from 146 seconds to just 14. The Chinese team also reported a four times increase in the speed of ERP access, which resulted in significantly increased productivity," states Sheriff. "In order to achieve the bandwidth acceleration experienced by the Swiss office we'd have needed to have leased an 8Mb line, four times bigger than the one we were using, at a cost of $85,000 per annum," he continues. "Replicating the Chinese performance improvement would have required a 9.5Mb line, four and a half times the size of the incumbent line, at a lease cost of $100,000." Sheriff also ran what he describes as a brief trial of Steelhead Mobile, which showed similar results to the site-to-site tests, with applications such as Lotus Notes no longer needing to create local file replicas, but running directly from the remote server. "Those results have subsequently led to us purchasing concurrent Steelhead Mobile licensing for 300-400 company laptops," he states. As for the future, Sheriff's team is now testing the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP). "Each Steelhead appliance has enough computing capacity for us to run a number of virtual machines from it", he explains. "We recently purchased RSP and created a 'thin office' in Taiwan using only the box and an Internet connection. This is something we will definitely explore further in future, as it would mean small offices need zero server infrastructure – resulting in huge capital and operational savings."