After an ERP consolidation project drove Merial to consider WAN optimization technology (see previous newsletter), the animal healthcare company selected gear from Silver Peak Systems.

A key driver was ensuring acceptable application performance for end users located in remote sites. For example, Silver Peak’s NX appliances can speed the responsiveness of an Oracle application that’s located in the U.S. at a global hosting facility and being used by Merial end users in Germany. In addition, Merial wanted to be able to perform consistent backups between its primary data centers, for disaster recovery purposes.

Late in 2008, Merial deployed Silver Peak’s appliances in North America (where its global hosting sites are located), followed by France. Deployments are underway in Australia and New Zealand as well.

Using Silver Peak’s gear saved Merial from having to upgrade the link between its primary data centers in the U.S., used for data replication. The WAN acceleration gear also lets Merial avoid upgrading links to some of its other corporate sites.

At Merial’s site in France, for instance, the company pays roughly $1,700 per month for 512k circuit. “If we would have had to increase that circuit, it would have cost about $65,000 over a three-year period, to upgrade that bandwidth,” estimates Derek Johnson, director of global networks at Merial. “Instead, for the purchase of the actual Silver Peak gear for that site, and the subsequent maintenance for a three-year period, it was a total cost of $20,000.”

Looking ahead, another five to 15 more sites are being considered for rollouts as Merial looks to centralize local infrastructure, such as e-mail, file and print servers, Johnson says.

When considering consolidating branch office services, “the issue becomes how to maintain LAN-like performance, now that you don’t have a local [Microsoft] Exchange server, or local file and print servers, because you’re going across the wide-area network,” Johnson says. “Silver Peak gives us that capability, to be able to maximize authentication across the network, and maximize file and print sharing, without having a local server. That system initiative may require additional installations.”

In terms of advice for other companies that might be considering a similar technology investment, Johnson stresses the need to carefully detail project expectations. “Have a plan, have goals, show before and after shots. Make sure that you educate senior-level management, because this won’t be a small expense.”

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.