Riverbed Technology announced that Marubeni America, an
overseas subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Marubeni, deployed Riverbed
Steelhead appliances with the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) across its
operations.
As part of the branch office consolidation initiative,
Marubeni America consolidated costly servers at 19 of its North American
locations, and accelerated application performance over WAN. As a result of
deploying the Riverbed WAN optimization solution and RSP, the company reduced its IT footprint branch
office locations while saving $330,000 over three years in hardware, support
costs and bandwidth.
Prior to its Steelhead appliance and RSP deployment,
Marubeni America faced the time-consuming challenge of managing remote branch
office servers at each of its 23 North American locations. RSP, a protected
VMware partition on the Steelhead appliance that can run up to five additional
services or applications, was essential in creating a branch office box (BOB)
platform.
“Each branch office was a data island. People in New
York City were not able to directly connect to data in Houston. When we first
installed the RSP, our goal was to eliminate the need to have a server in each
remote office. We did not have trained IT staff at each location, and therefore
before installing the Steelhead appliance with RSP, anytime we needed to
install an update or make a change, we would need to either travel to the
location or explain the process on a phone call. Once we installed the Steelhead
appliances with RSP, we immediately saw a huge performance increase, cut down
on the traffic that was travelling across the WAN, and we no longer had to
purchase and remotely support servers for each branch office location,”
said Shibasaki, manager of the IT Platform Department at Marubeni America.
When the consolidation project was complete, Marubeni
America was able to use the Steelhead appliances with RSP at each branch
location as the sole branch server, running virtualized instances of Windows Server
2003 that acts as a local print server, WSUS repository and DFS server.
As an added benefit of RSP, Marubeni America Corporation
remotely pushes updates and patches for McAfee, Adobe and SAP to each branch
location from the DFS instances via a Wake-on-LAN (WoL) script. In addition to
the significant cost savings, Shibasaki maintains that the reduced management
that results from using a simplified BOB platform further adds to the ROI
benefits of Steelhead appliances.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
