Case Studies
Global Intellectual Property Law Firm Improve Inter-office Collaboration, Productivity and Network Management using Riverbed's Steelhead® Appliances
Global Intellectual Property Law Firm Improve Inter-office Collaboration, Productivity and Network Management using Riverbed’s Steelhead® Appliances
Rouse and Co is a global intellectual property law firm with 17 offices worldwide in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, India, China and South East Asia. Globally they employ over 450 staff, 14 of which are IT specialists. Their head office is in London Docklands; other key office locations include Shanghai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Bangkok, Dubai, Delhi, and, Manila. They have a distributed network architecture utilising the Internet, MPLS, VPNs and a corporate WAN. Many applications are centralized in the UK with centralized IT Support.
Centralised applications included: PMS, CRM, Trade Mark DB, Sharepoint 2007, Workflow, Billing
The Challenge: To Reduce Network Latency and Improve Throughput across a Global Network of Offices
Global IT Director, Jonathan Bruce was faced with a dilemma. As an organisation with remote offices around the world, users were expecting data hungry applications to run with LAN like performance over limited or insufficient bandwidth. At the same time, it was increasingly necessary to consolidate IT infrastructure, simplify IT management and reduce costs.
"We were suffering from high latency on WAN links and had significant WAN costs. Not only that but users were unhappy with the speed of services that they used."
Jonathan looked at a variety of options. "Firstly we looked at increasing local bandwidth, however a 200% increase would have been needed which was just too expensive. The other option would be to deploy applications locally. We didn’t want to do this as this would deviate from our overall IT strategy of trying to centralize everything. Then we looked at wide area network optimization. This seemed like the only logical way to go."
Solution: Steelhead Appliances Overcome Network Limitations between Offices and Consolidate IT Infrastructure
Teneo recommended Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead Appliances which accelerate applications typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times between offices. The Steelhead Appliance’s intelligent optimisations offer organisations (that share data and collaborate between distributed offices) significant performance improvements for a broad range of applications that are important to their businesses. It offers organisations the ability to simplify their IT infrastructure and realise significant capital and operational cost savings.
Jonathan evaluated a variety of options and decided that the Riverbed Steelhead Appliance offered the capabilities that would help Rouse and Co overcome the challenges of poor network performance between global offices. Before implementing to other offices, Jonathan oversaw the installation of the Steelhead Appliances as a pilot between the Jakarta and London office.
"We set up a pilot to increase network performance between the Jakarta office and London office because the Jakarta office was the slowest office. The pilot was set up in 2005 and deployed in 2006. Our Jakarta office employed 55 staff. Users were experiencing the highest latency of any office and available bandwidth was limited (512kbs at a 1:4 contention). All applications and Internet Explorer ran over Citrix. The pilot took just one day to deploy and we experienced an immediate increase in network performance which kept our users happy!"
"4 months later with the pilot completed we decided to deploy steelhead units in 8 other offices in August and September. We preconfigured Riverbed’s appliance using a management console. The management console really helps you get a global view of where you are and it tells you if there is a problem which is fantastic! We haven’t needed to take anyone on to support the product. The IT for this was all centrally supported and monitored by the management team who have access to manage the network globally and can see easily if there are any problems."
Riverbed offers an optional Central Management Console (CMC) appliance which enables you to configure and manage many Steelhead appliances simultaneously. The CMC allows group management of devices, dynamic reporting, scheduled operations, over-the-wire software upgrades, and automatic "touchless" setup of new Steelhead appliances in your network.
"In Thailand we were using web based network hungry applications which held very image intensive trade marks and annotations. We also saw a four fold increase in demand for bandwidth. In the Shanghai office hub we started to centralise resources and backups to the hub. MAPI is the most used application with a different model of usage."
The Result: Reduction in Traffic, Reduced Latency and Improved Throughput Allowing WANs to Perform as well as LANs between Offices
"The proof of the pudding is in the eating! Not only has the Riverbed product been easy to deploy but it produced fantastic results! In London, 63% of our London office traffic is HTTP which showed 93% reduction. SMTP traffic is second most used with a reduction of 68%. Bangkok's Riverbed traffic summary showed an 80% reduction in HTTP traffic with a 40 times increase in bandwidth". The Shanghai traffic summary showed an overall bandwidth optimisation capacity increase of 5.9 times. Most of the network traffic from the Shanghai traffic was MAPI which saw an 80% reduction in traffic."
"We have consolidated and reduced support costs. Although we have experienced a 7 times capacity increase, end users haven’t noticed that they aren’t using local email. We have had a 6 times increase in file sharing but again users haven’t noticed any adverse affects on performance and we now have all backups centralized to a single office."
"Our future goals are to further consolidate IT infrastructure. We plan to centralize back up and email applications in smaller offices and look into document management."
"The Teneo team were invaluable in demonstrating the available products and showed an in depth understanding of the Riverbed product. They were able to understand our organisation’s needs and come up with the solution to our problems."