Carhartt Purchased Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced that Carhartt, a Michigan-based manufacturer of premium workwear, has purchased and installed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at locations in North America and Europe. Carhartt deployed the Steelhead appliances to speed performance of its centralized applications and to accommodate growth in Europe. Carhatt experienced a 10-month payback period on its Riverbed investment.

Established in 1889, Carhartt develops durable, premium, high-quality products and services for workers on and off the job. Headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, with more than 4,500 employees worldwide, Carhartt is privately owned and managed.

Over the last few years, Carhatt’s European operations have expanded. However, the company maintains a centralized IT model, with key applications and servers located at its headquarters in Dearborn. As the number of remote employees grew, the ability to access centrally located applications and data in real-time was becoming more critical. Carhartt’s IT group recognized that in order to accommodate the expansion of the business, it would need to add WAN optimization to its infrastructure.

"We were growing fast and wanted to be sure that all of our employees were able to access and collaborate on critical applications in a timely manner," said Asif Khan at Carhartt. "And, we did not want to increase our bandwidth spending. We needed to do more with the infrastructure we already had. We quickly realized that WAN optimization could provide significant performance improvements while helping us control costs."

Carhartt’s IT team installed an alternative WAN optimization product from a competing vendor at two locations, but was disappointed with the complexity of the offering. The company then turned to Riverbed.

Carhartt evaluated Riverbed during a one-month-long free trial and then quickly moved to install Steelhead appliances at locations in Amsterdam, Mexico, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. "We were very impressed with Riverbed," said Khan. "The ease of installation and management, the performance improvement and the reporting were night and day compared to the competition."

Following installation of the Steelhead appliances, Carhartt has experienced a 40% reduction in traffic on the WAN, while file download times for a 10MB database have dropped from 8-9 minutes to 2-3 minutes. User complaints about application performance have dropped dramatically at locations with Steelhead appliances installed.

"We have employees who travel regularly between our remote locations and do notice significant differences among the sites that do not yet have a Steelhead appliance installed even though these sites have the same WAN speed circuits," explained Khan. "Our traveling employees notice the difference and complain about the performance when they don’t get the benefits that the Steelhead appliances provide. It is a real pain point."

The company plans to install additional Steelhead appliances at locations in North America and Europe in 2009.

With the ease-of-installation that Riverbed provides, getting a new Steelhead appliance up and running takes Carhartt just minutes. "It now takes us about 20 minutes to configure a Steelhead appliance here at headquarters," said Khan. "We then ship it out to the remote location where a PC technician spends five minutes connecting cables. I couldn’t ask for an easier or more user friendly product."