The Ards Borough Council in County Down is one of 26 local authorities in Northern Ireland, administering an area of approximately 140 square miles with a population of 74,000. The Council performs a host of diverse functions, ranging from street cleaning and refuse collection to operating a retail craft outlet and public aquarium.

The council has nine offices within its boundaries including leisure centers, tourist offices and an arts center where employees use data that is stored locally, in addition to accessing centralized applications in the data center such as Lotus Domino and Microsoft (News - Alert) SQL over the WAN.

They decided to consolidate servers back to the data center to centralize back up and simplify management. To support the consolidation project, Ards Council selected Expand Networks (News - Alert) for its knowledge of WAN optimization and its ability to accelerate all applications.

The Ards Borough Council implemented one Expand 6930 series Accelerator within the main data center environment, and four 4930 series Accelerators for the remote offices of the Council. With minimum impact to the Council’s existing networking infrastructure, they say, "the Expand technology is delivering, on average, application and data acceleration of 200 percent, peaking up to 2,000 percent."

The product is enabling the Ards Council to compress and accelerate all traffic over the WAN, council officials say, to bring users into virtual proximity of applications, support the server consolidation project and achieve the aim of increased IT efficiency:

"The 6930 Expand Accelerator is providing Ards Council with up to 10Mbps of compression, up to 100Mbps of optimization and up to 45Mbps of acceleration for the central data center," Expand officials said, adding that the branch offices of Ards Council "are benefitting from up to 6Mbps of compression 45Mbps of optimization from Expand’s 4930 series."

Following a successful implementation, integrated WAN optimization technology is increasing the performance of all business critical applications for remote users at Ards Council.