LeasePlan Has Deployed WDS From Riverbed in UK
Fleet management company said to have realized a 10X performance improvement.
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on February 19, 2008 at 3:29 pmRiverbed Technology, Inc. announced that
LeasePlan, an international network of companies engaged in
fleet and vehicle management, has selected and deployed Riverbed’s WDS
solutions across its UK offices. The implementation has enabled
productivity at the company’s remote offices to greatly improve by
improving application response times, while also consolidating the IT
backup process and providing annual cost savings.
LeasePlan UK
works with some of the largest and most prestigious fleets in the UK.
It has more than 130,000 vehicles in its fleet, employs over 600
employees and has an annual turnover of more than £100m. LeasePlan
upgraded its wide-area network (WAN) as part of a global project to
rationalize its network operation to a single service provider. The end
goal was to improve the performance of applications over the network
and deliver cost savings to the organization. Unfortunately, the
outcome did not yield such results, so the IT team was forced to look
elsewhere to satisfy their application performance improvement needs.
easePlan’s
IT reseller, Redstor, recommended Riverbed Technology. After a
consultation and trial period with the Riverbed Steelhead appliances,
LeasePlan UK installed Steelhead products at each of its four UK
locations. Upon activation, LeasePlan recognized a 10 times performance
improvement in application response times, particularly for Microsoft
office applications, and cut its WAN-based backup and update process
from 1.5 hours to 20 minutes.
"The Riverbed Steelhead
appliances do ‘what it says on the tin,’ the installation was quick and
simple and the results were noticeable almost instantaneously," said
Andy Hussey, IT infrastructure architect at LeasePlan UK. "We needed a
solution that would allow our employees to share information across the
four UK sites. The Riverbed installation has effectively increased our
network capacity by up to five times, with speed of document access
increasing substantially," commented Hussey.
He continued,
"Given the way LeasePlan operates, we have a lot of office
collaboration in terms of information and document sharing.
Pre-Riverbed, complaints were on the rise and inter-office
collaboration was being hindered. We now have employees talking
positively about the network. In addition, the scalability of the
Riverbed system suits our business plans. For example, we have recently
doubled the capacity of one of our appliances to meet the needs of the
office. This upgrade was achieved without installing new hardware, it
was simply a case of purchasing new larger Riverbed licenses," said
Hussey.
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