* Riverbed’s WAN optimization gear trims costs for Millard Lumber
About a year ago, Joel Russell faced a common problem among enterprise WAN managers: he needed to improve the QoS of his Windows applications to remote and branch offices without spending too much on bandwidth.
The vice president of special projects at Millard Lumber in Omaha says the 256K bit/sec frame relay connection to four locations in Lincoln, Neb., didn’t provide enough bandwidth for the chatty applications traversing the WAN. He evaluated Peribit and Riverbed appliances, and found Riverbed at the time had the features needed to optimize his traffic. For one, Riverbed offered hard drives on each side of the WAN connection, which he says enabled more latency optimization.
The company spent about $20,000 on two Riverbed Steelhead 1000 appliances, one at a main location and another in Lincoln, and Russell reports that at times the traffic acceleration and compression appliances help him reduce data sent over the WAN by 90%.
“Basically it caches the segments of files that are most often used and similar to other files, so once the data is passed over the WAN it works as fast as it if were local. It seems local to the end user; there isn’t any latency,” he says.
Russell installed the appliance between his core network switch and router in the main data center and near the router in the remote site. It can be put in the path of traffic or out of the path so that any failures on the device don’t cause network problems. He uses the appliances to see how application traffic really uses his WAN bandwidth.
“It offers a lot of reporting traffic summaries, and shows me data reduction by application and how much that was requested on the LAN made it across the WAN,” Russell says. “This information makes us better able to plan how much bandwidth we need at each site.”
The lumber company is in the process of moving from its 256K bit/sec frame relay to T-1 connections, and Russell says prior to using Riverbed’s Steelhead 1000 appliances he thought the company might need to get three T-1 lines in place. But now, his plans are to swap out the frame relay – which costs the company about $4,000 per month – with a T-1 line. Another two T-1s would cost about $1,500 per month more each.
“The appliances are paying for themselves within the year,” he says. “To users at other sites, it seems like they are on a 10/100[M bit/sec] network and getting files locally.”
Yet Russell says Riverbed could add more features to the Steelhead 1000. For one, the company could add support for addition protocols. Right now, he says, the Steelhead 1000 primarily supports Windows protocols.
