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Nelson/Nygaard Accelerates With Riverbed

Deploys Riverbed (rather than Cisco WAAS) for remote office and mobile client WDS solutions to speed file access from 5mn to 2s

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that
Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates, a nationally recognized
transportation and transit system design and development firm,
successfully deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its five
offices nationwide and Steelhead Mobile to half of its employees.

With
minimal operational investment from its IT staff, Nelson/Nygaard
increased productivity by delivering LAN-like speed to distributed
employees, including those in branch offices and on the road.
Nelson/Nygaard chose Riverbed over Cisco Wide Area Application
Services (WAAS) and others because of its market-leading acceleration
capabilities for both remote offices and mobile workers, and its ease
of installation and management.

Nelson/Nygaard serves clients
across the globe, and provides transportation specialists with
expertise in transit service, accessible and specialized
transportation, multi-modal transportation, smart growth projects and
transit-oriented development, program management, financial planning,
and public participation and information. To ensure that professional
expertise can be applied regardless of an employee’s location, teams
are built across regions. As projects are designed and implemented,
employees from different offices collaborate on large 30-50 megabyte
documents such as AutoCAD, ESRI and Adobe files. At any given time the
company can expect at least half of its employees to be traveling – to
a job site, at a client location, or anywhere in between – requiring
fast access to very large files. For mobile workers, files would often
take longer than five minutes each to download, hindering productivity
and resulting in the frustration of many mobile users who would
frequently complain to IT.

"With
so many users working from branch offices and a myriad of remote
locations, IT was constantly receiving complaints about wide area
network (WAN) performance and its ability to handle the large files we
work with
," said Raj Singh, chief information officer and partner at
Nelson/Nygaard. "Employees were getting so frustrated that they were
taking matters into their own hands and buying hard drives for branch
offices – creating insecure copies of data. Given that we’re an IT team
of three, that just wasn’t a situation we could live with long-term. We
needed a solution that we could get up and running easily, and manage
without too much effort.
"

Nelson/Nygaard decided to evaluate
WDS solutions from Riverbed, Cisco and Packeteer by holding its own
extensive in-house bake-off between the products. "We first asked a
Cisco partner to demonstrate its WAAS offering, but it became apparent
immediately that Cisco’s products were too difficult to manage, even in
a relatively small test environment. We were able to get Packeteer up
and running, but realized that the device is merely a souped-up Windows
server, and we weren’t about to add more Windows servers throughout our
infrastructure and inherit the headaches of updating and maintaining
them," said Singh.

"With Riverbed, both their Steelhead
appliances and their Steelhead Mobile software just worked right out of
the box. Within a week of selecting Riverbed we had appliances deployed
throughout all five of our offices, and Steelhead Mobile software
deployed to half of our workforce. In no time our users were
experiencing accelerated performance and greater access to the data
they needed the most. Not only did it work quickly, but the performance
is amazing, and it is extremely easy to manage
," Singh continued.

After
IT deployed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile, Nelson/Nygaard
employees recognized the difference immediately. Files that once took
more than five minutes to download when working in branch offices or
remotely now take only two seconds, making download speeds that were
once unbearable almost unnoticeable.

In addition, employees
who were previously unable to effectively work from home when working
on a tight deadline can now access files and information just as if
they were in the office. Nelson/Nygaard is currently deploying
Steelhead Mobile to the remainder of its employees to enable efficient
data access and collaboration throughout its entire mobile workforce.

Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates


Riverbed Technology

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