Riverbed WAN acceleration helps Liz Claiborne fashion design

Fashion designer Liz Claiborne depends on WAN acceleration to keep response times tolerable as it rolls out a collaborative product life-cycle platform among 78 sites worldwide.

The company is weaning its staff away from using e-mail, phone calls and faxes to coordinate all the steps between clothing design and delivery of final products and at the same time is deploying its replacement -- customized, central tracking software.

Key to the success of the project is gear from Riverbed Technology that speeds up transfers between sites using a combination of optimizing TCP, reducing the bytes it takes to transport redundant data and reducing WAN exchanges at the application layer.

The faster response times allow Liz Claiborne to centralize servers where design work is performed, reducing the need to invest in branch-office servers and the upkeep they require, says Rakesh Patel, technical architect at the firm.

“Before Riverbed we were thinking about having local image repositories in every location, which was not very cost effective, and we wouldn't have as much control over the intellectual property if it's all over the place,” Patel says.

The company WAN is based on a hub-and-spoke model radiating around main offices in New York and New Jersey as well as hub sites in the West Coast, Canada, Europe and Asia.

Since 2005, 38 offices in North America and Asia have been outfitted with Riverbed Steelhead appliances. Plans are to install them in about 40 more offices by the end of 2008.

When the project is completed, WAN acceleration will also free up designers to travel without degrading performance of design applications they access from central data centers, he says. “A designer can go to Europe for six months, for example and act with the same information they had from here without a performance hit. That's a huge deal for us,” Patel says.

He says tests of the Riverbed gear transferring a 40MB file could take more than half an hour between some Liz Claiborne sites, but the transfer time was reduced to less than five minutes.

Patel says he looked at Cisco wide-area file services gear, distributed file services from Microsoft, and WAN acceleration equipment from Packeteer and Juniper.

For Liz Claiborne’s particular traffic mix, Riverbed outperformed the others. Juniper’s boxes came in second but provided 20% slower throughput, he says.

Most sites are connected to the Internet via dual T-1s or E-1s and link to server farms via a Cisco VPN. Without the Riverbed equipment, backups from these offices could take 14 hours, which meant sometimes backups didn’t complete before the offices reopened for the next business day.

Patel says IT staff preconfigured many of the branch office devices and shipped them for non-technical staff to install under the direction of technicians.

The only problem came when the company’s VoIP phones tried to register with the VoIP servers located in other offices and failed, apparently because of the compression being performed by the Riverbed devices. Passing VoIP traffic through the Riverbed gear without trying to optimize it cleared up the problem, he says.