* Managing remote office is now less of a headache thanks to apps acceleration
Pat Wagner had a tough decision. She needed to improve the performance of applications being served to a branch office in Germany, but she also needed to avoid deploying a server and hiring any staff to maintain it at that location.
As director of IT at Curt G. Joa, a provider of custom-built machinery in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., Wagner needed a way to provide better collaboration between the offices in the United States and Europe. With a 7-hour time difference between the offices, it was difficult for Wagner to guarantee systems would be free of processing and jobs when the German employees tried to tap the resources.
“We have a small office of engineers in Germany that supported our customers there. The staff needed to tap into our repository and servers to access engineering drawings, but they reported it could take them an hour just to open the Novell directory,” Wagner says. “We really didn’t want to put a server there because we didn’t have anyone there to maintain it and it was a expense we wanted to avoid.”
Wagner also knew the bandwidth she had in place should have sufficed to send traffic – an E-1 line in Germany and two T-1s on her end of the connection. She started to look into WAN optimization and application acceleration technologies. Silver Peak Systems made the top of the list because the company could handle the Novell environment.
“We talked and dealt with other acceleration vendors and we really couldn’t believe there was no product that could help with Novell,” Wagner says. “Silver Peak was fairly newly, but they had an agnostic approach, and we tried it because it was much cheaper then the server option.”
Silver Peak’s technology uses a method of traffic pattern recognition and local data caching to accelerate WAN traffic. The company says this technique can speed performance of all types of WAN traffic – including Wagner’s Novell directory – instead of just certain applications or protocols.
Silver Peak’s NX line of appliances run software that can accelerate the performance of WAN traffic by caching the bit patterns of WAN traffic in local storage. When the appliance recognizes patterns it already has seen it delivers the bit patterns locally, freeing up WAN pipes for other streams of traffic.
Wagner deployed two Silver Peak boxes, one in a corporate data center and another at the remote German site – the company had fiber to local offices and therefore doesn’t require acceleration tools to other locations. The appliance at the Germany office communicates with the central device so that each box knows what data is cached. Wagner reports that processes – such as opening the Novell directory – that could take up to an hour in the past have been cut down to seconds since deploying the appliances about two or three months ago. She even saved money in the process.
“We were looking at throwing $100,000 at the project by the time we were through. We managed to do it for $17,000 and it’s a success,” Wagner says.
But the real benefit for Wagner is in satisfied end users.
“We don’t think about Germany every waking moment any more. It was a constant headache for our department. So if I am not constantly worrying about the German office, then we are successful,” she says.
