User plugs in an appliance, reduces WAN traffic by 60%

Sometimes the easiest projects are among the most gratifying -- in the case of Thomas Weisel Partners and its WAN-optimization technology deployment, instantly so. With little effort and minimal cost, the network engineering team boosted WAN performance and turned user complaints into compliments, within a matter of minutes.

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With WAN-optimization appliances from Riverbed Technology, Thomas Weisel Partners has reduced the amount of data traversing the network by about 60%, says Kevin Fiore, director of engineering services at the San Francisco-based investment bank. Of the 23TB of data requested each month by remote users, about 9TB has to be delivered over the WAN, he says. As a result, remote file-sharing has improved, backup times have decreased and the network supports an increasing amount of real-time data, such as VoIP and video, without pause.

Thomas Weisel Partners taps into numerous capabilities of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances and the Riverbed Optimization System software to achieve that 60% optimization rate. These include packet compression, TCP optimization, application acceleration and data reduction. For the latter, the operating-system software analyzes and stores large traffic patterns locally, eliminating trips across the WAN. Any type of application can tap into the data.

With the appliances, "WAN utilization is more efficient, redundant WAN data is no longer sent, and more data is being sent per payload on each TCP round trip," Fiore says.