* Army boosts file transfer speed using WAN optimization appliance
Are you looking for a way to speed up the transfer of large files over your IP network? Consider the success that the U.S. Army Broadcast Service is having with WAN optimization appliances from start-up Orbital Data.
The Army Broadcast Service produces television broadcasts that are distributed via satellite to 2.6 million members of the U.S. Armed Forces. The service has broadcast stations in Virginia, California, Italy, Germany, Korea and Honduras.
The Army Broadcast Service sends video files – which range from 10M bytes to 1.5G bytes in size – from broadcast stations in Europe and Asia to its stateside facilities via a leased-line WAN. These files were taking 5 or more hours to get from Europe or Asia to the U.S. prior to the installment of Orbital Data devices.
“The first time we tried to send a news cast from Korea, the system told us it would take 18 hours. We were able to get additional bandwidth secured from our location to a network node, and we were able to reduce that time to 5.5 hours. But even that wasn’t acceptable,” says Mark Vagnerini, the director of operations for the Army Broadcast Service. With Orbital, “we can push a 1.3G-byte or 1.4G-byte file from Europe or Korea anywhere in the world in 38 to 45 minutes.”
About 18 months ago, the Army Broadcast Service was looking for a way to accelerate the delivery of its large video files. The group’s IT director came across Orbital Data, which sells appliances for optimizing WAN bandwidth and accelerating key applications.
Now the Army Broadcast Service has 10 Orbital Data 5500s installed, with nine more units planned for installation between now and 2007. The Army Broadcast Service is deploying the units in each of its primary broadcast stations as well as affiliated stations in Europe and Asia. The total cost for the Orbital Data devices is approximately $125,000.
“For us, the biggest return is that we’re able to get the product back [to the states] faster,” Vagnerini says. “In the broadcast world, the biggest thing is time. When we were mailing tapes back, we lost any type of timeliness. That’s our primary concern.”
Vagnerini says the Army Broadcast Service also is benefiting from improved utilization of its network bandwidth. “Our pipes carry more than FTP traffic [for video files],” he says. “We carry e-mail traffic. We carry radio broadcasts. At a minimum, we had to accelerate the FTP traffic. But during the two-and-a-half months that Orbital has been working with us, we are able to accelerate all traffic.”
Vagnerini says the Orbital Data devices have performed well so far. “A 30-second spot is about 22M bytes and that used to take us anywhere from 12 to 13 minutes to transfer unaccelerated. Now a 30-second spot is taking 2.5 minutes,” he says.
The only problem that the Army Broadcast Service has had is that a couple devices were damaged during shipment. “They’re easy to use,” Vagnerini says. “They have a complete Internet monitoring system so we can troubleshoot them remotely.”
Vagnerini says that any network manager trying to move or share large data files over a WAN should consider adding appliances like those from Orbital Data. “If you’re moving large data files or accessing large databases and if you want to try to maximize your bandwidth utilization, you’re going to want to use something like this,” he says.
