CCIC From China Buys Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced that China Continent Property & Casualty Insurance Company Ltd. (CCIC), one of the top five property insurance companies in China, has deployed award-winning Riverbed WAN optimization solutions, including Steelhead appliances, Steelhead Mobile and the Central Management Console (CMC). The deployment was initiated to increase worker productivity and optimize IT infrastructure in order to support CCIC’s core business expansion. As a result, CCIC has significantly enhanced the company’s application performance and at the same time reduced its bandwidth utilization by more than 70 percent, which in turn enabled the deployment of additional applications without incremental bandwidth costs.

Rapid expansion plans had put a strain on CCIC’s centralized IT model. The company responded by building a complex QoS scheme and purchasing expensive bandwidth upgrades to handle the growth, but this approach quickly became cost-prohibitive. CCIC upgraded its WAN bandwidth annually for the last three years. At the same time, application performance continued to suffer. Mobile workers had to contend with losing valuable time trying to download emails and files. Additionally, it was clear that future requirements such as disaster recovery and remote backups could never be met unless WAN optimization was incorporated into the infrastructure.

CCIC investigated WAN optimization offerings from several companies and ultimately chose Riverbed’s solution. "Riverbed was way ahead of the competition in real environment testing and the Steelhead appliances were far easier to deploy, manage and maintain. The Riverbed product suite enabled CCIC to substantially improve its infrastructure performance and thereby enable and sustain centralized access from its primary data center to all our remote branches," said Sun Shun Qiang, network supervisor at CCIC.

"The results have been excellent. Total deployment time was under one month and we now enjoy an over 300% increase of usable bandwidth. As a result, our users are now able to run more applications over existing links without an increase in bandwidth costs," he continues. "With the Riverbed Central Management Console, we have a real-time view of our data and visibility of operations, including aggregate reports throughout the organization. We expect to recoup our investment in less than two years."

Other benefits enjoyed by CCIC include simpler software upgrades and a more robust WAN infrastructure that is capable of supporting the planned organizational growth in the next three years.

CCIC is currently planning to expand its Riverbed Steelhead appliance deployment as well as roll out the Steelhead Mobile client software to all its offices. A new disaster recovery center employing the full breadth of Riverbed WAN optimization solutions is also currently under construction, ensuring that critical data can be recovered quickly should a disaster strike.