project | Steve Dolphin

Why I chose a bandwidth upgrade and not Riverbed

How would you spend £30,000 of a company’s money? To get this blog post started I’ll just entertain you with the stats, this is a bit like giving you the punchline before telling you the entire joke, but at the same time those of you that want a short answer will now get it.

This compares an existing managed 2mb/sec line with nothing on it; the same line with a Riverbed Steelhead installed and then the new line which was installed as a result of this entire project.

Data transfer speeds – a 600mb file transferred between two sites:

Before any changes: 1 hour and 10 minutes, 1.14mb on the 2mb/sec pipe
With Riverbed (first time): 51 minutes, 1.57mb/sec on the 2mb/sec pipe
With Riverbed (second time): 9 minutes, 8.89mb/sec on the 2mb/sec pipe
With 25mbps upgrade: 4.5 minutes, 18mb/sec on 25mb/sec pipe.

Now, the detail…

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Remote Working

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One of the biggest projects that I undertook at the end of last year was the Remote Working project. The brief was simple in essence: “we’ve got a team of about 12 business users who all have an interest in remote working in various guises (working from home; working when out and about; working from other offices etc) – get involved”.

Interestingly the team of business users already had some firm ideas about what they thought might be ideal technical solutions for their problems, using off-the-shelf-solutions like GoToMyPC.com to achieve connectivity to their office machines while out and about.

What’s often difficult in these situations is being able to trace your way back to the initial requirements – the question, “what do you want to be able to do?” can have many answers, and often these start with technical solutions rather than actual requirements, driving down to the original requirements is essential to make sure nothing’s missed, but at the same time you have to be careful not to make users feel like they’re jumping through hoops or covering ground they feel they’ve already covered.

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WAN Optimisation and Review

Many companies utilise some way of connecting their offices together, these Wide Area Networks can be national or international and they can be dedicated fibre optics between buildings or they can be home-user-broadband connections utilising some sort of VPN. Regardless of which system your company uses it’s worth revisiting it every now and then and making sure you’re getting the best out of it.

Businesses have cropped up over the last few years offering optimisation of these sorts of networks, people like Riverbed, GlobalScape WAFS and DBAM have been selling products for a few years now which allow you to get more out of your existing bandwidth, and many of them suggest that their products are more efficient and more economic than simply upgrading your existing link speeds. The latest version of Windows Server 2008 (R2) even has a facility built in which does something similar called BranchCache.

During the course of this project I will evaluate a few of these hardware and software solutions and establish whether or not they actually deliver and whether or not they really are better than just buying bandwidth.

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Why I chose Dell EqualLogic and not HP Lefthand

I spent quite a lot of time weighing up the pros and cons of the two most-similar disk arrays on the market, HP Lefthand and Dell EqualLogic. With similar names (PS4000E – Dell; P4000 – HP) and similar initially observable features (that is, they’re both lots of disks in a box, they’re both iSCSI) it was quite difficult to work out whether one was better than the other or not.

I chose Dell EqualLogic in the end, which means the rest of this post is likely to be flavoured with a bit of Dell bias, but I’ll try and explain why I went that way (depsite at the time receiving quite poor sales support due to placing the order in the middle of some bizzare change from partner channels to Dell Direct).

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Network Audit and Refresh

Before investigating the servers and the storage options that would build the final solution I first started with an audit of the existing network infrastructure – the cables and switches that make up the network currently.

Background Information
The office has about 120 employees in it, spread over 5 studios, with each studio containing 20-40 people, the employees use 2D and 3D CAD and BIM software to perform architectural work, there are also users of heavy Graphical Editing packages such as Adobe Creative Suite.
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SAN, Virtualisation and Infrastructure Refresh

This project was one of the largest undertaken so far, and for the sake of completeness when publishing I shall include the work that was undertaken on the network infrastructure (switches and so on). The current infrastructure was a small room full of hand-built (literally), tower servers. Many of the servers failed frequently due to niggling hardware issues such as problems with removable hard drive caddies and so on. These failures added up to about thirty (30) instances per month.

This project was a tremendous opportunity to build an infrastructure in its entirety and deliver a solution that fulfilled the initial high-level business requirements, namely delivering highly available systems which would allow the staff to work during core business hours without suffering any “computer downtime”.
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