Friendly Ice Cream Corp. needed a way to improve the performance of Web applications traveling over its satellite network to some 535 restaurants. While the satellite net provided the $575 million restaurant chain with cost savings on phone communications, it failed to serve Web pages fast enough, with load times ranging between 20 seconds to 2 minutes to total timed-out failures.

"We went from a dial-up world to the satellite system, which reduced the cost of our phone bills but provided us with limited abilities to do Web pages," says Stephen Manning, senior systems engineer at the company's headquarters in Wilbraham, Mass. "We have large Web pages running sophisticated applications for our restaurants, and we realized we'd need an accelerator to improve performance."

In January, Manning began looking into products, and based on several criteria - such as working with specific applications that enable individual restaurants to inventory food supplies and order more produce - he decided to test acceleration tools from FineGround Networks and Stampede.
 
Tests of the product proved to Manning that Stampede WebRider would better suit the company's needs because it was easy to deploy and required less training that he believed the FineGround product might.

"We are a busy shop, and it seemed to require a lot less effort to get it started and training to maintain it," Manning says. He is still in the process of getting the software clients rolled out to 535 locations by pushing the software out from the headquarters.

Stampede WebRider comes packaged on an IBM server loaded with SuSE Linux software as well as the acceleration products from Stampede. It installs in the data center and behind a corporate firewall and in front of a Web server farm. The appliance uses content-aware caching and bi-directional compression to speed Web application traffic over corporate WANs to remote and branch-office locations. 

Manning reports he is already seeing positive results.

"We are seeing at least an average 50% increase in Web page load speed and at most an 80% increase," Manning reports. "We expect when we get it rolled out to more than 500 locations to only see more good results."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.