Riverbed Deployed by Ctrip.com

Riverbed Technology announced that Ctrip.com (Ctrip), China’s leading one-stop online travel service provider, has deployed Riverbed Steelhead WDS appliances between its headquarters and two branch offices in China. The deployment of the Riverbed WDS solution has enabled Ctrip to reduce its bandwidth utilization by up to 65 percent and improve application performance across the network by as much as 50 times, thereby increasing IT efficiencies while providing cost savings.

"As an online travel service provider, Ctrip’s operation relies heavily on rapid data throughput. The Riverbed Steelhead WDS solutions dramatically improve core business application response times and allow our employees to share information across the three locations while reducing overall data traffic," said Mr. Chen Di, head of Ctrip’s Technology Department.

"Previously we would have had to purchase expensive bandwidth upgrades to support our growth, but with Riverbed we not only did not have to purchase more bandwidth, we actually reduced our existing bandwidth utilization leaving us much more room to grow – without additional cost. We have witnessed a 400 percent improvement in our network utilization efficiency, while our application response times have increased anywhere from five to 50 times. HTTP-based data compression was increased by as much as 88 percent," Mr Chen added.

Before deploying the Riverbed solution, Ctrip’s branch offices were each connected to its data center through a 2MB internal link. As Ctrip’s business grew, an enormous increase of information, including hotel reservations, flight schedules and status of customer order details, which was converging into the Shanghai headquarters, was beginning to adversely impact business operations and customer responsiveness.

Ctrip’s initial steps to address this problem involved an extensive evaluation of WDS technologies, with the best test results coming from Riverbed products. Riverbed accelerated application performance by five to fifty times. Ctrip noted that this increase in performance far outweighed the likely performance increase that would come with the purchase of additional bandwidth, which offered an increase of only two to three times.

Ctrip is China’s leading online travel service provider, offering more than 19 million members complete services including hotel, air ticket and holiday resort reservations, business trip management and arrangement of special suppliers, and responding to travel information enquiries. Headquartered in Shanghai, Ctrip has branch offices in Beijing and Guangzhou with more than 7,000 employees nationwide.