Cases Riverbed 2009

CASE STUDIES
Extreme Savings
With Riverbed
Amassing huge savings with Riverbed WDS solutions
Particularly in difficult economic times, organizations of all sizes strive to streamline costs while
leveraging productivity gains. Many companies will evaluate various cost-cutting initiatives in
order to weather the storm. However, enterprises need to be careful to pursue cost cutting
measures that won’t negatively impact business operations or hinder growth in the long term. The
paradox facing CIOs and IT managers is how to control or reduce costs while still providing strategic
value for the business.
With wide-area data services (WDS), leading companies can slash network and IT costs while
simultaneously improving application performance and business processes. By accelerating
applications up to 100x, organizations can easily consolidate their IT infrastructure and minimize
bandwidth utilization saving thousands or even millions of dollars annually. WDS can also enable
accelerated disaster recovery operations to minimize the impact and cost of downtime while also
saving money on idle DR bandwidth links.
Thousands of companies have already achieved the following results:
Site and Server Consolidation –• With WDS, companies can consolidate entire data centers
or servers from branch offices without compromising application performance. The LAN-
like performance enabled by Riverbed Steelhead products eliminates the trade-off between
consolidation and speed. Consolidation becomes a reality – without impacting the productivity
of your branch users.
Save money on bandwidth –• By delivering massive capacity throughput increases, Riverbed
customers can use a T1 circuit as if it were 20 meg pipe. This allows companies to defer
bandwidth upgrades for years saving big dollars on network costs.
Eliminate backup infrastructure and tapes –• Organizations can leverage WDS to backup data
over the WAN and eliminate tapes and backup infrastructure in branch offices. This is a hard
cost savings and an administrative blessing by no longer having the office manager mix up the
incremental and full backup tapes.
Save money on DR -• Most industry analysts estimate that network costs consume approximately
30% of overall DR expenses. By reducing bandwidth usage, IT can outfit DR sites with smaller
links for data replication to save on recurring costs.
Want to learn more?
Attached are 4 enlightening case studies about very different organizations
that have used WDS to achieve Extreme Savings. These case studies will
show you how to do the same thing to your environment. Your executives
will be impressed when you make the impossible, possible. Let Riverbed
show you how. Think Fast.

CASE STUDY
Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, Ltd.
3TB File Server Consolidation Project completed with the
Riverbed Steelhead®
Appliance
Realizing a cost savings of over 12,000,000 yen per year through
WAN optimization, with improved data security and improved availability
Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, Ltd. (“Mitsubishi Motors”) was aiming to further increase
its competitive strength by consolidating its information systems at key locations within
Japan. As part of this effort, in 2005 they consolidated a total of 50 Windows NT-based
file servers (5000 users) at three locations whose hardware maintenance contracts had
expired, replacing them with a single EMC Celerra NS series. By introducing the Riverbed
Steelhead appliance, they were able to provide end users with performance comparable
to that of LAN access and reduce WAN traffic by over 90%. They also strengthened
data security, centralized management, enabled a large reduction in TCO, and
improved availability.
Issue: Consolidation of Windows NT-Based File Servers Distributed At Three
Locations Into One Location Without Loss of Performance
At Mitsubishi Motor’s main locations within Japan, namely, the Mizushima factory, the
Power Train factory, the passenger car engineering center, and headquarters, a total
of about 1000 servers of various types are in operation. Most of them had been intro-
duced and were operated by individual
departments, and therefore there was
a lot of room for TCO savings. Their
consolidation had become a company-
wide issue, including items such as
unification of management standards
and service levels.
Just at that time, during 2005, in three locations in the Kansai region, there were about
50 Windows NT-based file servers whose hardware maintenance contract periods had
expired, and the Mitsubishi Motors IT planning department decided to consolidate the
servers when they were replaced.
“In our company, the operations management of servers is outsourced, and the main-
tenance contract fee depends on the number of servers. So in order to lower the cost,
it was necessary to reduce the number of servers by consolidating them. It was also an
urgent matter to consolidate the servers in order to enable centralized management.
Doing so, we could unify access rights management, which was handled differently in
each department, as well as the backup management standards, and thereby strengthen
data security,” said IT planning department expert Yasuhiro Nishikawa.
Solution: The Riverbed Steelhead Appliance
As it took steps towards server consolidation, the Mitsubishi Motors IT planning
department initially worried that inter-regional consolidation using CIFS over a WAN
In BRIEF
Industry
Manufacturing (Automotive)»»
Challenges
Reducing the cost of operations»»
Improving data security»»
Making the level of service more uniform»»
Solution
Riverbed Steelhead Appliance»»
Benefits
TCO savings of 1,000,000 yen per month»»
Access performance comparable to that»»
of a LAN, through a 90% reduction in
WAN traffic
Improved data security through central-»»
ized management
Improved availability»»
The issue was company-wide
consolidation, including TCO
reduction, unification of
management fundamentals
and service levels.

would not provide satisfactory user performance, so they formulated a plan that
included both consolidation between key locations, and separate consolidation at each
location. However, after they saw the Riverbed Steelhead appliance at the 2005 Data
Storage Expo, they decided to combine the servers at the three key locations in the Kansai
region into one. Mr. Nishikawa of the IT planning department explains what happened
at that time as follows: “At first we didn’t have high hopes for the results that WAN
optimization could produce. However, we borrowed a test machine to try out the
Riverbed Steelhead appliance, and when we tried out applications under conditions
similar to those of actual usage environments, the performance was superb, and we
came away with a whole new perception of it. At that point we decided to unify the
servers across key locations.”
However, while consolidating servers across regions with WAN optimization, the
Mitsubishi Motors IT planning department still had to provide a service level that met
the stringent requirements of end users.
Mr. Nishikawa speaks openly of the difficulties prior to introduction: “WAN-optimized
equipment was an unknown technology in our company, so at informational meetings
for users, the questions concentrated on
the issue of whether performance could
really be guaranteed.” In order to answer
such criticisms, the IT planning department
performed repeated simulations addressing
that issue, and what would happen
if they performed consolidation using
the Riverbed Steelhead appliance. They
carefully verified that it would be possible to consolidate using the existing bandwidth.
Again, when the actual layout of the Riverbed Steelhead appliance and the server
design were decided, the IT planning department, before the fact, conducted a detailed
investigation of the number of sessions and the amount of data to be transferred.
CASE STUDY: Mitsubishi Motor Corporation, Ltd.
We decided to use the
Riverbed Steelhead appliance,
which enabled consolidated
servers with superb
performance.
SITE A
Cisco Switch
Client
Steelhead 3010Steelhead 3010
WAN Router
SITE C
Cisco Switch
Client
WAN Router
DATA CENTER
Cisco Switch
Client
Integrated File Server
(EMC Celerra)
WAN Router
SITE B
Cisco Switch
Client
WAN Router
WAN
Yasuhiro Nishikawa
Expert of IT Planning & Control
Dept.Corporate Affairs Office
Mitsubishi Motors Corp.
Junichi Tomita
IT Planning & Control Dept.
Corporate Affairs Office
Mitsubishi Motors Corp.
Mitsubishi Motors Deployment Architecture

This task was given to Mr. Hideo Okada, the chief of the third engineering department in
the technology headquarters of MCOR Co., Ltd, who recalls the difficulties of that time
as follows: “We investigated the amounts of data on all the file servers at the time, the
traffic, and the amount of data transmission, to decide on the specification. This study
would decide whether to consolidate servers across locations, so we were
very nervous.”
Before using the Riverbed Steelhead appliance, Mitsubishi Motors also did compari-
sons against competing products. Along
with performance, factors that led to the
choice of Riverbed included the wealth
of compatible protocols and applications,
cost performance and a strong support
structure. Junichi Tomita of the IT planning
department, who was responsible for the
planning, described an episode in which
“a product competing with Riverbed was
unable to open some application files that
are essential to our company.”
In this way, after various investigations, the final specification put together by
Mitsubishi Motors was to consolidate about 50 Windows NT-based file servers (3.5 TB) at
three key locations in the Kansai region into a single EMC Celerra NS series NAS, and use
the existing wide-area network (10 to 60 Mbps) to establish a CIFS connection between
the key locations via the Riverbed Steelhead appliance. Mitsubishi Motors uses two
SH5010 machines, four SH3010 machines, and two SH1020 machines.
Transition work on file servers at each location began in May 2006, and by November
2006, all the data at said locations was stored in the EMC Celerra NS series.
Since that time, minor adjustments have been made, such as in the settings for admin-
istrative rights that are not suited to use the increased speed provided by the Steelhead
appliance, individual processing of certain high volume files, and the transition to daily
business operation has been implemented without problem.
Effect: Major Reduction in TCO, Enhanced Data Security,
and Improved Availability
At Mitsubishi Motors, now using the Riverbed Steelhead appliance to consolidate servers
across regions, they have been able to achieve their initial goals, namely, a great reduction
in application cost, improved data security through centralized management, and a great
improvement in availability.
“With the TCO conversion, we are saving over 1,000,000 yen per month, and in addition,
centralized management has strengthened data security. Service levels, which previously
varied at each location, have also improved,” said Mr. Nishikawa.
Also, by using an active standby redundant structure in which two Steelhead appliances
are continuously in operation, reliability has greatly improved. Together with the next-
generation consolidated storage environment, high availability has been realized.
“In the environment prior to consolidation, there were applications that, separately
from the file servers, used CIFS, so WAN access had become heavy, and we were asked
whether that situation could be improved. Now, with consolidation that uses the
Steelhead appliance, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in speed. We haven’t researched
each user individually, but it appears that user satisfaction in general is extremely high,”
noted Mr. Nishikawa.
With the TCO conversion,
operating costs have reduced
by 1,000,000 yen or more per
month. Also, performance
comparable to that of LAN access
was achieved due to a 90%
reduction in WAN traffic.
Hideo Okada
Okazaki System Department,
MMC COMPUTER RESEARCH, LTD.

2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure
performance company. The Riverbed family
of wide area network (WAN) optimization
solutions liberates businesses from common
IT constraints by increasing application
performance, enabling consolidation, and
providing enterprise-wide network and
application visibility – all while eliminating
the need to increase bandwidth, storage
or servers. Thousands of companies with
distributed operations use Riverbed to make
their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive
and more responsive. Additional information
about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available
at www.riverbed.com
Riverbed Technology
199 Fremont Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: +1 415 247 8800
Fax: +1 415 247 8801
www.riverbed.com
Riverbed Technology Pte. Ltd.
391A Orchard Road #22-06/10
Ngee Ann City Tower A
Singapore 238873
Tel: +65 6508-7400
Riverbed Technology Ltd.
Farley Hall, London Road
Binfield
Bracknell
Berks RG42 4EU
Tel: +44 (0) 1344 401900
Riverbed Technology K.K.
Shiba-Koen Plaza Building 9F
3-6-9, Shiba, Minato-ku
Tokyo, Japan 105-0014
Tel: +81 3 5419 1990
© 2009 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. Portions of
Riverbed’s products are protected under Riverbed patents,
as well as patents pending. Riverbed Technology, Riverbed,
Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, Think Fast, the Riverbed logo,
Mazu, Profiler, Atlas and Cascade are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Riverbed Technology All other trademarks used
or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
CS-MSB013109
CASE STUDY: Mitsubishi Motor Corporation, Ltd.
Future Prospects: Further Server Consolidation Involving
Overseas Locations and the Addition of Applications
With the successful completion of this consolidation project using the Riverbed Steelhead
appliance, the Mitsubishi Motors IT planning department has great confidence in server
consolidation across regions. Mr. Tomita, who worked on this project, gave a positive
analysis: “There are several minor issues, but overall, the choice of server consolidation
with the Riverbed Steelhead appliance was a good one. We plan to continue with this
method in carrying out future server consolidation.”
The Mitsubishi Motors IT planning department has introduced the Riverbed Steelhead
appliance into the environment for server consolidation at headquarters, which had been
started before the server consolidation across the three key locations in the Kansai region.
In addition, it is now looking into using the same method for further consolidation, such
as for CAD applications and mail servers that are currently running separately within each
location, and file servers at key overseas locations.
The Riverbed Steelhead appliance is set to play an ever-increasing role in providing a
more efficient IT strategy for Mitsubishi Motors.

CASE STUDY
Psomas
Psomas Achieves Global Work-Sharing and Accelerates the
Mobile Worker with Riverbed®
Steelhead®
Products
Psomas is a leading consulting engineering firm offering services for private companies
and government agencies in the water transportation and land development markets.
Psomas is ranked nationally as one of Engineering News Record’s (ENR’s) Top Engineering
Firms. They have achieved an award-winning reputation for innovation, creativity, and
cutting-edge technical expertise. The cornerstone of their business approach is to focus
on clients’ long-term needs and guide strategic growth to meet those needs. Founded
in 1946, Psomas has grown into a full-service consulting firm with over 800 employees.
Their professional staff is at the forefront of technology, focusing on the technologies
that support clients’ success.
Psomas has 20 offices throughout the west as well as an office in Nogales, Mexico.
Challenge: Sharing Work Across Offices in a High-growth Environment
As a high-growth firm, Psomas needed to accelerate application performance to accom-
modate a changing set of demands from the business as well as employees. “The problem
was three fold,” said Chris Pinckney, Chief Information Officer at Psomas. “We needed
to overcome frustrating delays that were hindering project collaboration and work sharing,
avoid mishaps with miscommunication among employees, and at the same time deploy
technology that could keep up with our pace of growth.”
Psomas regularly uses 300-500 MB AutoCAD and Bentley MicroStation CAD files, and must
share those files among offices and mobile workers. “File sharing was a real challenge.
Our files were so large that it wasn’t feasible to send them back and forth during the
day with changes.” Pinckney recalled, “Offices would keep their own copy of the file to
work with, but that led to multiple copies of the same file that were out of sync. Field
crews would often have to go back to the office in order to get updated files or, worse,
would be working off of old data. We needed to have a system where all users could
have access to the freshest data and didn’t have to worry about whether they had the
most up-to-date version of the file.”
In addition, Psomas has been experiencing 20% per year growth, putting a priority on
sharing work with new offices. But each new office added a significant strain on its
existing network infrastructure. “Bringing new offices online was a significant hurdle.
We needed to do it fast and effectively. We’ve started implementing offshore facilities
in Mexico and outsourcing to a company in the Philippines. We wanted to ensure that
offices, no matter where we establish them in the world, can work in real-time.”
Solution: Riverbed Steelhead Products Make All Employees Feel Local
After considering bandwidth upgrades and point products, Pinckney decided to go
with the Riverbed Steelhead solution. He noted that the decision was based on actual
test results.
in brief
Industry
Engineering»»
Challenges
Enable collaboration among remote»»
offices, field crews, and home-based
workers
Support steady company expansion, off-»»
shoring, and changes in the workforce
Centralize and consolidate servers into»»
the data center
Solution
One Steelhead appliance was deployed»»
in each existing office
One Steelhead appliance will be»»
deployed in each future branch office
Steelhead Mobile deployed on laptops»»
for home workers, field crews, and very
small offices
Benefits
$1,000,000 saved annually by reclaiming»»
¼ hour per engineer daily
File and email servers centralized,»»
improving data freshness and decreasing
maintenance costs
Mobile workforce is integrated more»»
effectively into company operations

CASE STUDY: Psomas
2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
About Riverbed
at www.riverbed.com
Riverbed Technology
199 Fremont Street
Tel: +1 415 247 8800
Fax: +1 415 247 8801
www.riverbed.com
Singapore 238873
Tel: +65 6508-7400
Binfield
Bracknell
Berks RG42 4EU
Tel: +44 (0) 1344 401900
Tel: +81 3 5419 1990
Mazu, Profiler, and Cascade are trademarks or registered
“When we tried file sharing using Steelhead appliances, the results were dramatic.
Transfers for a completely new 325 MB file, which were infeasible before, took just
over 14 minutes with a Steelhead appliance. Transfers for an edited file took about 2
minutes, the same amount of time that it takes us to access the file on a LAN.”
Following these results, Pinckney decided to deploy Steelhead appliances in all offices.
“Results were pretty dramatic in our branch offices. So when our organization started
becoming more mobile, we knew we should consider using Steelhead Mobile for our
out-of-office applications as well. Now we get the same kinds of results whether it’s the
field crews out at job sites, home-based workers that need to collaborate with office
staff or small offices where we couldn’t put an appliance in place.”
Benefits: Steelheads Appliances and Steelhead Mobile Enable Work Sharing
and Data Consolidation
Psomas has seen impressive results from deploying Steelhead products. “With Riverbed
Steelhead products deployed worldwide, our employees can now share work and
leverage resources wherever they happen to be. Employees can now quickly download
shared files, upload changes, and collaborate effectively. We’ve heard things from our
remote workforce such as, ‘I feel like I’m part of the team again.’” Pinckney also noted
huge productivity gains. “Estimating just ¼ billable hour saved per employee per day,
Psomas has saved over $1 million in a year with the Riverbed Steelhead solution. When
you add in the fact that new offices can immediately be productive by taking on tasks
from other offices, the value of this product is staggering.” Overworked offices can
offload tasks to other offices, and new offices can take on projects from established
offices until they generate their own workload.
CS-PSO03109
More than 25x faster
0 30 60 90 120 150 180 210 240 270 300
Without Steelhead
First
Steelhead Operation
Subsequent
Steelhead Operation
0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200 225 250
Without
Steelhead
First
Steelhead Operation
Subsequent
Steelhead Operation
Too long to test
Time Improvement of Initial Replication of 30MB of PPT File – Time to Complete (in seconds)
Time Improvement of Initial Replication of 48MB File over 3MBPS DSL – Time to Complete
(in seconds)

CASE STUDY
Allen Matkins
Riverbed®
Steelhead®
Appliances Enable Global Collaboration for
Law Firm
The Allen Matkins law firm (www.allenmatkins.com) has been focused on providing quality,
reputable counsel for more than 25 years. Allen Matkins brings creative solutions to complex
issues, turning problems into opportunities. With more than 200 lawyers situated in five
major business centers in California, their practice is not merely statewide, but national and
international in scope. The Firm has developed seventeen highly successful practice areas
including Corporate and Securities, Litigation, Real Estate, and Technology.
Allen Matkins’ practice is founded on the belief that the relationship between clients and
lawyers is unique and that the best interests of clients are served by long-standing individual
relationships and personalized service. One of the top 200 law firms in the US, Allen Matkins
regularly receives accolades such as “Best in the West” by California Lawyer, and “Top 50” by
Daily Journal.
Challenge: Enabling Collaboration for Inter-Office Client Teams
As a law firm focused on relationships and personalized service, Allen Matkins takes customer
demands very seriously. The Firm’s growth during a period of industry consolidation is a result
of that focus. But customer demands have been changing rapidly. “Customers now expect
the Firm to provide a broad range of expertise, across practice areas,” noted Frank Gillman,
Director of Technology for Allen Matkins. “Our Firm must now create inter-office client
teams that leverage specialized staff in
different offices in order to provide the
best possible client service.”
“We needed our wide area network to
be an enabler for the way our attorneys
work,” commented Gillman. “But with
data distributed across offices and network
latency impeding access, attorneys spent significant amounts of time finding and accessing
information.” Critical applications for Allen Matkins included Interaction CRM by LexisNexis,
and DOCS Open document management by Hummingbird.
Litigation case files, upwards of 60 megabytes, could take more than 20 minutes to
download. If an attorney made any edits to the file, the changes would take another 20
minutes to upload. Attorneys would become frustrated and complain, and at the same time
they would have to work longer in order to meet their required billable hours.
In addition, the existing data architecture required replicated information located in each
office to be synchronized nightly. That scenario eased attorneys’ access to local information,
but introduced challenges for both collaboration and IT management.
In Brief
Industry
Professional Services (Legal)»»
Challenges
Improve client service by centralizing»»
information and documents to enable
corporate-wide access
Enable inter-office client teams to»»
effectively collaborate over the wide
area network
Eliminate attorney hours wasted on»»
frustrating, non-billable tasks
Solution
A Steelhead appliance was deployed in»»
each of 6 offices
Benefits
$980,000 in estimated productivity»»
gains by eliminating long downloads,
tracking down up-to-date information,
and use of old information
Centralized CRM makes up-to-date»»
customer information usable to all
practice groups in real-time
$130,000 in annual bandwidth expenses»»
avoided with one-time Steelhead
appliance purchase.
“Riverbed is ahead of the
competition in its ability to
support all of our critical
protocols.”

Solution: Steelhead Appliances Overcome Network Limitations
Gillman, along with senior engineers Clark Snyder and Jay Nash, considered Riverbed
Steelhead appliances, but also examined Peribit WAN accelerators (now part of Juniper
Networks). Gillman commented, “We also considered adding more bandwidth and
hardware, but the annual leasing
expenditures made a bandwidth upgrade
prohibitive compared to a solution like
Riverbed Steelhead appliances.”
In doing due diligence on Riverbed and
Peribit (Juniper), Gillman and his team
realized that a critical component of a WAN
optimization solution was the breadth of
protocol support and cross-application support. “Riverbed is ahead of the competition in its
ability to support all of our critical protocols. Combined with the raw power of the product
to accelerate data transfers using both data reduction and latency optimization, this was
the winning solution.”
In addition, Gillman was impressed with the Riverbed sales force. “Before Peribit (Juniper)
even met with us, Riverbed had assessed our needs and arranged for a full on-site
evaluation. Riverbed effectively pursued our business and ensured that this project would
be successful for Allen Matkins.”
Benefits: Better Client Service, Reduced Non-Billable Hours, and Simpler
IT Management
Riverbed Steelhead appliances have enabled Allen Matkins’ attorneys to focus on delivering
the best possible client experience without enduring frustrating downtime, lost hours, and
non-billable overhead. Gillman estimated, “Using the Steelhead solution, we have eliminated
more than 20 non-billable hours annually for the average attorney working in a remote
office. Now we can provide our high-quality client experience while eliminating behind-
the-scenes manual labor by our attorneys. That also translates into an estimated $980,000 in
annual productivity gains for Allen Matkins. ”
“Litigation case files, which took more than 22 minutes to download, can now be
downloaded in 2.5 minutes for a cold transfer. Edits followed by a transfer across the network
take about 8 seconds. No amount of
added bandwidth could do that for us.”
Steelhead appliances have also enabled
consolidation of IT infrastructure. Because
access to information is now accelerated,
critical client data and documentation
can be centrally stored at the corporate
data center, where all practices can access
it. “Because of Steelhead appliances, we
no longer need to maintain as much remote IT infrastructure. We have changed the way we
deploy remote infrastructure and back up remote data, for the better,” concluded Gillman.
End users also noticed a difference. Gillman recalled, “When we deployed Steelhead
appliances, people noticed something was dramatically different with the network. Riverbed
helped eliminate frustration for employees in all our offices, and that leads to a more
effective, more enjoyable work environment. Plus, my staff can focus on forward-looking IT
projects to keep Allen Matkins ahead of the competition.”
CASE STUDY: Allen Matkins
“Litigation case files which took
more than 22 minutes to download
can now be downloaded in 2.5
minutes for a cold transfer. No
amount of added bandwidth could
do that for us.”
Cost Comparison:
Steelhead Solution vs Bandwidth Upgrade
Bandwidth
Upgrade
Steelhead
Solution
Year 1
Equipment $45,000 $69,000
Annual Expenses $165,000 $16,000
Year 2
Annual Expenses $131,000 $16,000
Total (Year 1 + Year 2) $341,000 $101,000
“The raw power of the product
to accelerate data transfers,
using both data reduction and
latency optimization made it the
winning solution.”

Cost Comparison
Gillman knew that Allen Matkins needed to upgrade its WAN in order to meet the needs of
a changing legal environment. While Gillman and his team understood that a bandwidth
upgrade alone could not provide the same high performance level as a Steelhead appliance
deployment, they knew that a cost comparison would provide more internal support for the
Steelhead solution. The team assembled key
financial data (see Cost Comparison chart to
left) in order to compare the cost of the two
solutions for Allen Matkins.
As the chart to the left shows, over the
course of just two years, the cost of
deploying the Riverbed Steelhead solution
would be 70% less expensive than the cost of implementing a bandwidth upgrade. Annual
operating costs for the Riverbed Steelhead solution are a staggering 88% less expensive
than a bandwidth upgrade.
Summary
Alan Matkins needed to optimize its WAN in order to enable its attorneys
to provide better client service. At the same time the Firm aimed to
eliminate frustrating, non-billable tasks that were impeding the practice
of law.
After reviewing competitive products and bandwidth upgrades, Allen
Matkins deployed the Riverbed Steelhead solution in order to overcome
latency and bandwidth limitations.
With Steelhead appliances, Allen Matkins’ attorneys have accelerated
access to the freshest data, regardless of the attorney’s locations.
Collaboration is eased, and non-billable hours are reduced.
“Steelhead appliances have
changed the way we deploy
remote infrastructure and back
up remote data, for the better.”

2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
About Riverbed
at www.riverbed.com
Riverbed Technology
199 Fremont Street
Tel: +1 415 247 8800
Fax: +1 415 247 8801
www.riverbed.com
Singapore 238873
Tel: +65 6508-7400
Binfield
Bracknell
Berks RG42 4EU
Tel: +44 (0) 1344 401900
Tel: +81 3 5419 1990
CS-AM031306

CASE STUDY
GeoEngineers
Riverbed®
Steelhead®
Appliances and Equallogic Enable
Accelerated, Simplified Replication
GeoEngineers, Inc., (www.GeoEngineers.com) offers an integrated suite of services for companies looking
to build communities, harness and manage the earth’s resources, and move both products and people.
The company operates at the intersection of earth science and technology, and calls on expertise in both
disciplines to deliver results for clients. Since its founding in 1980, GeoEngineers has successfully completed
more than 25,000 projects worldwide for clients in the Energy, Transportation, Water & Natural Resources,
Development, and Federal markets. Today GeoEngineers, Inc. has hundreds of experts working locally and
across the globe from 15 offices.
Challenge: Enabling Collaboration for Specialists in Different Offices
GeoEngineers, Inc., faced the challenge of enabling their workforce to effectively collaborate over the
WAN. “Our employees are very specialized,” noted Courtenay Bernier, Information Technology Manager.
“As a result, we have to enable employees to be able to work in real time over the WAN. Our workforce
uses a range of applications from CAD, GIS, and Microsoft Office applications, to Exchange Email,
SharePoint, and Microsoft CRM”.
“But IT faced the challenge to make sure that employees were getting the performance that they need
across this broad range of applications. Our staff often has to work on very large files — hundreds of
megabytes — and it is not easy to share those across the WAN. It might take us 2 hours to transfer a typical
720 MB file from one office to another. This amount of time would make it challenging to our employees
to stay productive. In fact, we had even instituted
guidelines on file transfers for employees to ease
some of the performance issues.”
Bernier continued, “We were also replicating
our files from our branch offices to HQ using
Microsoft DFS, and we were replicating back to
our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. The SAN provided us with cost effective, easy to manage centralized storage, and
DFS was a simple way to perform replication. The challenge, however, was optimizing DFS over the WAN.”
Solution: Steelhead Appliances Overcome Network Limitations
Bernier looked into WAN optimization to solve the challenge of slow replication over the WAN. “We
considered the F5 product and the Riverbed Steelhead appliance as well as a few others; however the
Steelhead appliance really worked for us. We did extensive testing and the Steelhead appliance really
proved itself in our live environment. Working
with our reseller, we were able to provision three
evaluation devices and integrate them quickly in
our network ourselves”.
“The results were pretty impressive. That 720 MB
transfer was cut from 2 hours to 10 minutes on
the first transfer. Subsequent edits to the file and retransfers were reduced to just 5 seconds. With that
type of speed, I knew that our staff would be able to collaborate in real time.”
“At the same time, the Steelhead appliance was optimizing our bandwidth. In fact, although we only had
a 3 Mbps connection in our data center, the Steelhead appliance was enabling us to get up to a virtual
155 Mbps,” continued Bernier, “On average we see a 3.4x to 4x increase in our WAN capacity with no
additional investment in actual physical capacity.”
In BRIEF
Industry
Professional Services»»
(Environmental Consulting )
Challenges
Enable employees with different»»
specialties to collaborate from different
offices
Allow IT to keep pace with strategic»»
acquisitions and staff growth
Provide faster file replication capabilities»»
Control bandwidth costs»»
Solution
A Steelhead appliance was deployed in»»
each of 15 offices
Benefits
Real-time collaboration on files becomes»»
a reality
Significant reduction in data replication»»
times — in some instances it was cut
from 2 hours down to 10 minutes
Simplified, accelerated WAN and Storage»»
infrastructure
Seeing virtually 155 Mbps throughput on»»
a 3 Mbps link
“We did extensive testing — the
Steelhead appliance proved itself
in our live environment.”
“Our replication times have
been cut from hours to just
minutes or seconds.”

2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
About Riverbed
at www.riverbed.com
Riverbed Technology
199 Fremont Street
Tel: +1 415 247 8800
Fax: +1 415 247 8801
www.riverbed.com
Singapore 238873
Tel: +65 6508-7400
Binfield
Bracknell
Berks RG42 4EU
Tel: +44 (0) 1344 401900
Tel: +81 3 5419 1990
CASE STUDY: GeoEngineers
Bernier also discussed the actual deployment of the Steelhead appliances. “Similar to the use of our
EqualLogic SAN, we found the Steelhead appliance really easy to deploy. Unlike other technologies
that require significant changes to existing network infrastructures, the Steelhead appliance fits in
transparently. We didn’t have to make any changes to our routers, switches, servers, or clients. The
technology just works.”
Benefits: Better Collaboration, Simplified Replication
Bernier discussed the new solution GeoEngineers had put in place. “The combination of
Riverbed and EqualLogic has provided the perfect solution for us. We get accelerated replication
over the WAN — to the point where our employees can share files and collaborate in real time.
That means employees can work across offices — across the globe — on projects together. They can
leverage the right skills for the right job, no matter where someone is located. We reduced the need
to send personnel to other offices to complete projects, which incurs significant travel costs and can be
disruptive to productivity. Now we can simply
move the work instead of moving the people.”
“In addition to the collaboration aspect of using
Steelhead appliances, we have seen incredible
benefits for our replication processes of remote
servers back to our EqualLogic SAN. Hours of
transfer times have been cut to just minutes or seconds. We eliminated the need to add additional
servers as the company grows; our SAN grows with us and Riverbed continues to optimize and
accelerate network traffic. The complete solution scales very well.”
Return on Investment
Bernier knew that, while the collaboration benefits of this WAN optimization solution were obvious, it
would be easier to justify the purchase based on hard ROI. “We looked at the throughput that Steelhead
appliance was giving us above the max bandwidth we were purchasing. We estimated to buy that much
bandwidth; we would have to spend over $400,000 annually. Instead, we had a one-time spend of about
25% of that on Steelhead appliances plus ongoing maintenance. The ROI was obvious to executive
management and payback was just a matter of months.”
Future Plans
Looking into the future Courtenay knew that there would be changes to their application infrastructure.
“For example, we know that we’re going to be transitioning to Microsoft SharePoint as a collaboration
management tool.” Courtenay was excited to be able to utilize his Steelhead with these new projects.
“Because Steelhead appliances accelerate a broad range of applications, we know that we will see
dramatically accelerated SharePoint performance. With Steelhead appliances, we won’t have to have
multiple SharePoint servers either.”
Summary
GeoEngineers needed to enable their employees to collaborate in real-time
across the WAN. At the same time, the company wanted to accelerate its
file replication back to headquarters.
After reviewing competitive products and doing extensive testing,
GeoEngineers developed a solution combining the Riverbed Steelhead
appliance and the EqualLogic iSCSI SAN.
With Steelhead appliances, GeoEngineers can guarantee accelerated
access to files at any office location. At the same time, replication is
accelerated back to an easy to manage, scalable SAN.
“The ROI was obvious to executive
management, and payback was
just a matter of months.”
CS-GE042507

2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
About Riverbed
at www.riverbed.com
Riverbed Technology
199 Fremont Street
Tel: +1 415 247 8800
Fax: +1 415 247 8801
www.riverbed.com
Singapore 238873
Tel: +65 6508-7400
Binfield
Bracknell
Berks RG42 4EU
Tel: +44 (0) 1344 401900
Tel: +81 3 5419 1990
Mazu, Profiler, Atlas and Cascade are trademarks or registered
CS-GE052809

Cases Riverbed 2009

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