WAN Bandwidth Optimization for Nationwide Construction Company

Any company with offices and operations nationwide has a critical need for reliable file accessibility. Users in remote locations must to be able to quickly access the files they need—even when those files are housed on a server thousands of miles away. Bandwidth can become a debilitating issue when the company is a large commercial and government construction contractor dealing with enormous files containing specs and drawings. This was the case when the head of data center operations at this construction company called MicroAge.

When I spoke to this client he had been receiving complaints from his wide area network users in the company’s offices and worksites across the country. Employees and contractors were losing productivity because of the long waits to download files stored at their headquarters. He needed a solution to optimize the organization’s WAN.

I spoke to the client at length to fully understand his requirements. The company has more than 2,000 employees, 20-plus offices across the country and numerous worksites at any given time. The solution must be able to handle the massive files that are part of any heavy construction operation and bring them to the user’s computer—and fast.

After gaining an understanding of the capacities and demands any new solution would have to handle, I began my research. I looked at several possible solutions and I decided Silver Peak Systems would provide the best performance for this client.
Silver Peak has a unique method for optimizing traffic that makes it superior to its competitors. Their NX appliances sit between network resources and the WAN infrastructure that is used to connect them to remote users. Deployment of NX appliances requires absolutely no client, server, or application reconfiguration. NX appliances use Silver Peak’s patent-pending Network Memory™ technology to significantly reduce the amount of data traversing the WAN and ensure LAN-like application performance.

I presented my findings and recommendation to the client. He was impressed with the capabilities and ease of use of the Silver Peak solution so I arranged for demo units to be delivered. The Silver Peak NX-8600 WAN Optimization Appliance in the data center and the NX-5700 at the most distant location. What better way to test this new bandwidth optimization appliance than to have the office on one coast try accessing files from the data center on the other coast?
The results were nothing short of remarkable. Users immediately saw significant improvements in file access speed. So much so that the data center manager is now considering rolling out the Silver Peak NX solution to all of the company’s locations.

Faster file access speed and the resulting increase in productivity were not the only benefits MicroAge and Silver Peak provided this client. The data center manager has reported that he has been able to lower the amount of bandwidth they lease from their Internet service provider, resulting in a cost savings that will pay for the Silver Peak installation in less than a year. Needless to say, he is delighted with the results.

This is just one of the many solutions that MicroAge has been able to provide this client. Please contact me to see what I can for you