Last week I participated in a case study presentation at a breakfast hosted by Expanse IT in Perth – focussing specifically on the Riverbed product.
We’ve had Riverbed as a part of our WAN for 1 year now, and it was nice to be reminded of just what a great product its been for us. Now I’m not interested in advertising any one product over another, but at a time when we had terrible WAN performance and very unhappy users, I just wanted a nice quick and easy fix – and kudos is due to Riverbed for delivering that.
The part I really like is that it doesn’t lock our network into a proprietary architecture. We’ve since done some other projects around SANs, servers, Active Directory, and application redevelopments, and Riverbed just keeps on doing one nice simple thing – squeezing more traffic down our slow links than we ever could before.
We outlaid around $35,000 to connect 7 offices across Australia, and we are getting an average 3x increase in WAN performance – and some applications (web traffic and Lotus Notes) are being accelerated by 70% – 90%. As we are rebuilding our applications to be web-enabled, that’s a major business enabler for us.
Riverbed came along at a time when simply upgrading the speed of our pipes was being quoted at around $1 Million by all the major ISP’s – and that would have done nothing for the inefficiencies caused by our old applications (especially Lotus Notes). Being smarter about what went into the pipe in the first place seems drop-dead obvious, but how to go about it wasn’t.
If your in a similar situation, then give Riverbed a look – it may get you out of a hole just like it did me, and make your executive managers a lot less likely to scowl at you in meetings (and Expanse IT setup a free trial that was great – we got the performance increase stats within 1 day, and I was brandishing those printouts at meetings with some relief shortly after).
If you want any further detail of what we did or the results now – I’ll happily share screen shots or more info of our environment – please comment/message me.
