These diverse locations do mean that we are reliant upon inter-continental links to keep our monitoring estate live at all times.

In order to keep administration, management and support of our support systems we wanted to consolidate all of the corporate IT infrastructure into two main data centres in London and Brisbane. This presented a number of challenges around application performance across high latency links crossing the globe.

A number of the key line-of-business applications require fast and reliable access from all locations.  This includes access for a number of highly mobile workers.  These demanding users might be in Singapore one week, then Houston, Texas the next, so ensuring good quality connectivity is a challenge.

An innovative solution ensures Applicable deliver support reliably and consistently

To enable consolidation of the key applications including Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, our ERP and CRM systems required an approach which was both innovative and simple to deploy.

When we had tested the applications over a simulated WAN in the test environments they performed poorly over the high latency links, even when we opened up high bandwidth connections. We had already rolled out a fully meshed network using VPN’s to our 4 core sites and we wanted to continue with this architecture to consolidate our business critical applications.

We looked to one of our partners, Riverbed for a solution.  It was proposed that we should deploy Riverbed Steelhead appliances in each of our 4 core locations, enabling optimised connectivity across the whole enterprise. Immediately we saw large performance improvements in our core applications. Users in Australia were reporting that a number of standard activities which had previously taken over a minute were now being completed in under 10 seconds, Peter Ross (APAC operations manager) commented “The deployment of these devices has taken away the pain of using UK-based systems.  We have seen dramatic reductions in the time taken to complete lots of our standard tasks.  Users in Australia have asked if we have moved the servers!”.

Return on Investment from Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

When considering the deployment of the Riverbed devices we weighed up the cost of additional bandwidth against the cost of the devices and whether additional bandwidth would solve our issues, which were predominantly latency problems. Applicable General Manager Mark Ward commented “the ROI of the devices just from a financial point of view is extremely compelling, however the bigger gain for Applicable was seen in the increased productivity and user satisfaction across the core application estate”

In analysing the statistics, Network Manager, Dave Whistler said “Almost immediately we saw bandwidth savings of around 60% and our live testing showed the key transactions had decreased in time by an average of 85%. This has allowed us to give more bandwidth to some of the more time sensitive applications such as VOIP, which has increased in quality as a by product of optimising the core applications”

Future Plans

Applicable will continue to deploy Riverbed devices to all of its 6 data centres across the globe and to all remote offices. The Steelhead Mobile Client has also been deployed and continues to be rolled out to give the same accelerated access to Applicable’s mobile workers.