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Organizations of all sizes strive to be more productive and run low cost operations. Particularly in difficult economic times, many organizations 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 day-to-day operations or constrain long term growth. Employees need to do their jobs more efficiently than before, so it is vital to keep IT infrastructure up-to-date. Ideally, organizations should not make deep cuts in investments that may jeopardize future growth, such as product improvements or hiring of key personnel.
Much has been written about wide area data services (WDS) and its ability to improve productivity and collaboration across the enterprise. However, WDS investments can often be justified solely on the basis of cost savings. These cost savings can be achieved without negatively impacting operations – in fact, in most instances WDS helps organizations run better while cutting costs. Riverbed has over 3500 customers, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, who are using our WDS solutions to reduce costs while improving productivity. Many Riverbed customers have seen a return on investment in just a few months because of the significant hard cost savings in areas such as bandwidth reduction and IT consolidation.
This paper explores how enterprises can use Riverbed solutions to cut hard costs and make the most of their existing infrastructure, without negatively impacting their operations.
What is Wide Area Data Services?
Riverbed is the pioneer and market and technology leader in WDS - the first comprehensive solution to a host of problems that plague enterprise applications operating across the wide area network (WAN) including:
- Poor application performance in distributed environments
- Insufficient, expensive or congested network bandwidth into remote offices
- Difficulties in successful IT consolidation
- Challenges with slow remote data backup and replication
- Increasing demands of the mobile workforce
Using WDS solutions from Riverbed, enterprises can improve application performance across the network typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, and can simultaneously reduce WAN bandwidth utilization by 65 to 95%. These dramatic results allow businesses to take advantage of their networks, infrastructure, and applications in ways they had never imagined possible.
WDS solutions accelerate applications by taking an integrated approach to application performance across the WAN. While some approaches solely focus on network optimization, or just concentrate on acceleration for a specific application, WDS improves the performance of all applications running over TCP and also has application-specific modules that address chatty application protocols. This combination enables WDS solutions to accelerate the applications that enterprises care about most, and provides the ability to easily add more functionality over time.
WDS products are architected to scale all the way from the largest data centers with clustered appliances down to software on a single user's laptop (or desktop). For organizations looking to optimize branch office operations, Riverbed offers a full line of Steelhead Appliances that can be easily integrated into a customer’s network. There are thirteen models of Steelhead Appliances to choose from, based on the bandwidth to the site in question, the amount of data being used, and the number of desired TCP connections (roughly proportional to the number of users). For enterprises that want to improve productivity for their mobile workers, Riverbed also offers Steelhead Mobile software, which can be installed on a user’s laptop to optimize that mobile user’s communications with the data center. In effect, Steelhead Mobile software turns a user’s laptop into a Steelhead Appliance, so that mobile users can enjoy the same performance benefits as workers in a Steelhead-enabled branch office.
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