Psomas earned a top spot in the Network World Renovator Award contest for a network overhaul that involved migrating from frame relay to Multi-protocol Label Switching and implementing a wide-area file distribution service that changed the way company engineers work.

Erik Durand, corporate network manager at the civil engineering firm in Costa Mesa, Calif., says he began the WAN overhaul to accommodate the company's growth and demanding design tools. Plans called for tying six more remote locations to Psomas' eight current facilities in the coming year, and longer-range projections forecast head count almost doubling to 1,000 by 2010.

Durand started working with Sprint in August 2004 to swap his frame relay network for a fully meshed MPLS network. While the upgrade wouldn't increase network speed, it would allow for fewer hops between locations and reduce latency by an average of 2 millisec to 3 millisec on each hop.

"The MPLS network enabled us to 'shotgun' our dual T-1s linking West Los Angeles, Costa Mesa and Roseville," Durand says. "So instead of separate 1.5M bit/sec connections we have a single 3M bit/sec [pipe between those locations and 1.5M bit/sec] links to other locations."

When the MPLS WAN was cut over last November, it enabled Durand to turn his attention to finding a way for engineers at various offices to share CAD files that range in size from 300M to 500M bytes.

"Work-sharing between offices had been occurring for some time but it was not a popular option because it was cumbersome," Durand says. "In order for two or more offices to share work on a project, files had to be replicated to each location's file server. The consequence was that an engineer in one office was only able to work with data from a remote location from the day before. It was costing the company money in duplicate efforts and lost billable hours."

Durand decided to use wide-area file service (WAFS) appliances. He evaluated devices from several vendors and settled on Riverbed's Steelhead equipment. To speed traffic between clients and servers and deliver LAN-like response times he installed the devices at all branch offices.

The Steelhead appliances understand Microsoft's Common Internet File System and the Unix Network File System, and can predict the response a server or a client needs, such as an acknowledgement. They also can produce the response locally rather than getting it from across the WAN.