Wifi Revolution

Riverbed Technology WAN optimization solutions are helping Kendle International, a global clinical research organization, speed performance of its centralized applications.

 

By using Riverbed (News - Alert) Steelhead appliances, Kendle has been able to dramatically reduce its bandwidth utilization, increase employee productivity and reduce its overall IT infrastructure costs, the company said.

 

Kendle uses a multi-tiered IT infrastructure to support its growing employee base in dispersed locations worldwide. Its IT infrastructure consists of six regional data centers responsible for maintaining a large amount of equipment and various infrastructure components.

 

Riverbed officials explain that a number of these locations have a huge amount of clinical data that is regularly accessed by employees in Kendle's global locations. It is important for Kendle to access centralized applications and a variety of internal applications and is thus constantly searching for solutions to improve remote access and improve overall system efficiency, the company said.

 

Kendle was using network compression appliances at its six primary data centers, and also deployed Citrix to WAN-enable the heavier core applications. The firm later decided to upgrade its network bandwidth and experienced marked performance improvement.

 

However, Kendle reevaluated its entire WAN optimization environment by engaging Gartner (News - Alert) for market analysis and then began a vendor evaluation process.

 

James Miller, director of global networking and telecommunications at Kendle, said the firm sought to find a new WAN optimization solution that would positively impact their end-users' experience when accessing their centralized applications.

 

Riverbed gave top results in all the tests it conducted in its real-world environment.

Miller informed that the company received positive responses from remote office end-users and IT staff during the free trial of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances.

 

“Once the evaluation was complete and the devices removed, we had end-users and IT knocking on our doors asking what had happened,” Miller said in a statement.” This was the big seller for us. A positive end-user experience is critical.”

 

Riverbed Steelhead appliances were deployed at six primary data center locations of Kendle. The solution delivered quick results and within a 30-day timeframe, the company was able to remove 1.2 terabytes of data from the WAN and experienced a more than three-fold capacity improvement in terms of the bandwidth utilization.

 

Thanks to Riverbed, Kendle is also experiencing reduced utilization of WAN bandwidth.

 

“Selecting Riverbed as our WAN optimization vendor has provided us with scenarios for our IT infrastructure that we haven't previously been able to take advantage of,” said Nathan Thompson, Corporate Nework manager at Kendle Thompson continued. “The application acceleration and data deduplication was critical, but the added benefit of further consolidating infrastructure at our remote locations provides us with great cost savings and productivity gains.”

 

Kendle’s IT team also likes the synergies that Riverbed solutions had with VMware technology. The organization intends to further reduce its IT footprint at remote offices through the use of VMware on Riverbed's RSP platform.

 

As TMC (News - Alert) reported, Riverbed Technology recently teamed up Singapore Telecommunications (News - Alert)) to provide SingTel (News - Alert) Traffic Optimization and Profiling Service Application Accelerator (TOPS AA) service based on Riverbed's WAN optimization solutions.

 

Back to WiFi Revolution home