* WAN acceleration at work at GHAFARI Companies
Robert Bell faced a bit of a Catch-22 situation. He needed to improve application performance from company headquarters to two remote locations, but he also had to keep local-area users satisfied with their application response times.
Bell, director of IT at architect, design and engineering firm GHAFARI Companies in Dearborn, Mich., had already invested in WAN acceleration products from a “flashy start-up,” but found the start-up’s approach helped remote users but hurt local staff. And when he looked into getting the T-1 lines connecting the offices upgraded to T-3s, he was “shocked by the cost increase.”
“The WAN was strangling my LAN. What we had in place didn’t do [quality of service] and I believe that is why the WAN was getting increased throughput but the LAN was so far down in priority that performance suffered,” Bell says. “I needed to improve throughput on the WAN, however, I have many more users on my LAN. I couldn’t jeopardize my LAN for the sake of my WAN so I kept looking for more options to boost performance across the board.”
To ensure the staff in the Chicago and Indianapolis offices were served applications as though they were local, Bell started talking to Juniper. Within a few days of deciding to go with Juniper, Bell says he had three Juniper WXC 500 appliances ready to configure and deploy.
Bell says the Juniper interface allows him to do reporting on WAN utilization, better serve CIFS and Exchange traffic, and put QoS policies in place.
“We are also going to be utilizing voice over that WAN and the box can support QoS, which is critical for me and [the] voice traffic. It will allow me to either compress and cache voice traffic or choose to ignore it without installing another appliance,” Bell says.
