* Why Ball chose Silver Peak’s network and application optimization platform
Network World recently produced its first IT Roadmap conference of 2008 in Denver and there Jim interviewed Jamie Batmanglidj, senior systems architect for Comcast’s Media Center, and Curt Hastings, director of enterprise architecture for the Ball Corporation. The focus of the discussions was how each organization had added functionality to the WAN in order to respond to evolving business requirements. The last two newsletters discussed the interview with Batmanglidj, who described how Comcast tackled the problem of sending massive files over the WAN. Today, we’ll detail how Hastings and the Ball Corporation selected a network and application optimization platform.
Ball Corporation is a supplier of high-quality metal and plastic packaging products for the beverage, food and household products industries. The company owns Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation, a supplier of aerospace and other technologies and services, primarily for the U.S. government. Including all of its subsidiaries, the company employs more than 15,500 people worldwide and recorded 2006 revenue of $6.6 billion.
According to Hastings, his organization was interested in deploying a network and application optimization platform so that it could deploy centralized backup in the short term as well to eventually take file services out of the company’s various plants and consolidate them into a central site. He pointed out that prior to deploying the optimization platform the company was storing files at each of the individual plants, and that all backup operations took place there. Because of their intelligent caching engines, WAN accelerators allow his organization to cache locally what each plant needs, and yet store the actual files on a central file system where they can be efficiently backed up.
Hastings said his organization evaluated a number of network acceleration products whose functionality varied widely. Some products only performed four or five functions but did all of them very well. In contrast, other alternatives supported “a Swiss army knife of functionality but typically not all of these functions were performed well.”
Hastings chose an optimization platform from Silver Peak. He stated that Ball initially had some difficulty tuning the system but that now it has learned more about the system as well as the intricacies of its IT environment the system is working well and the organization has been able to successfully implement a centralized file storage and backup capability.
Insight from end users is just on of the reasons to attend Network World’s IT Roadmap conferences. The next IT Roadmap conference will be in Chicago on April 2 Hopefully many of you will be able to attend.
