Conseil Général de la Manche Selects Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that ‘Conseil Général de la Manche‘ (CG50), Manche General Council in France, has selected and deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at 35 locations across the county to speed the performance of applications across its Cisco network in a consolidated IT environment.

Manche County is located in Normandy and has more than 1500 employees working at 40 offices. The staff is responsible for infrastructure and facilities, training and quality of life and social policy, serving a local population of nearly half a million spread over 6000 square km and with over 350 km of coastline.

A small number of IT staffers service the broad needs of the 40 offices. The number of file servers at the remote sites had reached a critical point, causing operational issues and severely taxing the resources of the IT organization. The IT group decided to solve these problems by consolidating the file servers to a central location and eliminating as much infrastructure as possible from the remote sites. However, they could not do this if user performance was affected. After conducting thorough research and working with Computacenter to explore the alternatives, the IT group turned to Riverbed and WDS for a solution.

"We had recently absorbed new staff and new sites, such as the highways department, into our organization," said François Viard, IT and Security Manager at Manche General Council. "This puts additional strain on our IT organization as we sought to manage our many file servers across considerable distances. We’d lose at least one person’s productivity for half a day when we needed to troubleshoot a file server. We needed a solution that would allow us to centralize without sacrificing speed. We found that solution in Riverbed."

The county has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its main remote locations. Installation occurred without changes to the existing Cisco IT infrastructure. According to François Viard, "Since deploying the Steelhead appliances, we’ve been able to remove many of our file servers, and application performance is very satisfying. At the same time, we have been able to lower IT expenses by reducing the number of servers in the branches and cutting IT overhead."

Lastly, according to François Viard, consolidation has allowed the IT staff to offer new services. "We have a large number of field staff," said François Viard. "With consolidated IT infrastructure these staffers are able to access their files from any site, whereas in the past they were limited to accessing files from their home office. These new capabilities allow our employees to work from anywhere and dramatically improve collaboration and file sharing."