RSSHow to Make Your WAN a Fast Lane: One Company's Story
Linklaters, one of the world's largest law firms, has to support lawyers in 23 countries, working on 9 million documents with about 30 million versions. To keep pace with the torrent of data being shared via core business apps, the company had to make over its WAN.
Linklaters believes that Silver Peak's products and roadmap best align with our overall business strategy. Silver Peak's network layer approach to WAN optimization gives us a sense of confidence that we can optimize any applications we want, as evidenced by its ability to handle our Citrix, VoIP and EMC SRDF traffic. In thinking about the future, we did not want to worry about which applications would be supported across our WAN and which would not. Silver Peak's solution combines WAN optimization with traffic shaping. In addition to deduplication and packet loss correction, they provide robust Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities that obviate the need for separate Packeteer products in the Linklaters network.
Rollout and ROI Results
We bought Silver Peak NX appliances through a trusted reseller partner, Response Data Communications. They partnered closely with us during the testing and subsequent implementation phases.Deployment involved shipping the Silver Peak appliances to all of our sites around the world. Local engineers racked and stacked them, and we configured them locally using Silver Peak's Global Management System (GMS). It was a very quick rollout from our point of view—about two months—and it began to pay dividends immediately.
We are seeing the following benefits:
- 1. Faster and more reliable Citrix performance, even to remote offices in Latin America and Malaysia. This has enormous benefits across the entire organization, including better access to shared knowledge resources and faster printing
- 2. Sixty-five percent improvements in average WAN bandwidth utilization. This has helped us to delay (or in some cases avoid) bandwidth upgrades in several Linklaters offices.
- 3. More responsive Internet and Intranet browsing, including faster downloads of multimedia traffic.
- 4. Toll-quality voice calls using our VoIP infrastructure. This has helped Linklaters standardize on a single IP-based telephony platform for significant cost and management savings.
Today, WAN optimization is critical to our business. Our employees have grown accustomed to the performance they are receiving, and we have grown accustomed to having a WAN infrastructure that supports our key IT and business objectives.
© 2009 CXO Media Inc.
WAN optmization
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