wan-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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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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