Releases

posted on 22 July 2008 15:07

22 July 2008– Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today that building, surveying and construction technology firm CNP has selected and deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® WDS appliances at six of its sites in the UK and Germany.

The deployment is part of the company’s efforts to consolidate its IT infrastructure, centralise application delivery, improve file replication, and reduce its network management overhead after a period of international growth. Since the implementation, CNP has seen a 50 percent reduction in bandwidth utilisation, a ten times improvement to file transfer times, and a five times improvement to backup times.

CNP specialises in all aspects of building and quantity surveying, project management and construction technology. Reporting a yearly turnover in excess of £10 million, expansion has been rapid, with eight offices located in the United Kingdom and Germany. Today, the company’s 110-strong workforce delivers building and project consultancy to a broad client base, including financial institutions, property developers, occupiers, agents and the public sector.

Richard Seear, CNP’s head of IT, explains the problem they faced: “Sudden growth meant we had to look at ways of providing all the services and the numerous applications that were required, without having the cost of installing large servers. With a server in every site, there’s a lot of overhead for support and maintenance, both in terms of the servers themselves plus the cost of the additional hardware and software.”

To meet this challenge, CNP wanted to carry out a major re-architecture of its IT infrastructure, including consolidating the network via the data centre in Manchester. However, it became clear that a WDS solution would be required to enable file replication without considerable spending on additional bandwidth. CNP turned to Riverbed, as Seear comments, “We looked at other suppliers in the market, but there just wasn’t enough background on their options, whereas the Riverbed solution was a proven technology.”

To trial Riverbed, CNP conducted test replication scenarios and some ‘user acceptance’ tests on Steelhead appliances. “We ran several users on the new system and didn’t tell them that we’d changed servers, just to see whether the phone would ring… it didn’t,” stated Seear. Following this successful pilot, six Steelhead appliances were installed and configured in a day and a half.

The installation has enabled CNP to replicate its files across the wide area network (WAN) using a fraction of the bandwidth it previously needed. The company can now replicate 80Gb of documents across the WAN in less than a week while only using 512kps of physical bandwidth. Previously this task would have taken up to two weeks. In addition, CNP can now optimize its email traffic, allowing 50 percent of its Exchange Servers to be removed from the network.

“I would estimate that the Steelhead appliances have paid for themselves within the first year, purely from an IT perspective, without factoring in enhancements for the end users in terms of improved productivity,” said Seear.

Steelhead Products

Riverbed WDS solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, Riverbed’s award-winning Steelhead WDS products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead products have been deployed in organizations ranging from the world’s largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart. To learn more, view Riverbed’s demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.

^{[Formatted by Paul Warren.]}