Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners Deploys Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that global architectural design company Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its organization to improve employee collaboration and enhance its now centralized disaster recovery (DR) solution.

Seamus Conway, network manager for RSHP, explains: "With Riverbed Steelhead appliances installed we saw file download speeds and remote access improve by 80 percent, enabling our employees to access and work with files and web applications over the wide area network (WAN) regardless of where they were located. In addition, we were able to enhance our now centralized DR solution between our headquarters and a third party site using our current Internet link. We have configured the DR traffic to use only 2Mbps of the total bandwidth available. Without Riverbed, our users would still be struggling to access files and we would have needed a 100Mbps bandwidth link for the DR site. We would have incurred a significant cost."

RSHP is an award-winning international architectural practice with 140 employees worldwide and offices in London, Barcelona, Madrid and Tokyo. The company has wide experience working on a range of major international architectural projects which are co-ordinated out of its principal office in the UK and through local project offices across North America, Europe and South East Asia.

RSHP wanted to run operations around the clock, so constant employee collaboration was needed throughout its network of offices. However, due to the nature of RSHP’s work, file sizes can be very large – 50GB or greater – with links to data in other files. This resulted in employees spending long periods of time waiting for files to download. In addition, RSHP must keep the file for the lifetime of the building, so data loss is a significant concern for the company.

RSHP worked with its technology reseller, storage integrator B2net, to investigate WAN optimization solutions. "We looked at a range of WAN optimization solutions, but Riverbed was the only vendor we found to provide a truly network-based and future-proofed solution," explains Conway. "Riverbed enabled us to enhance our centralized DR solution, which is synchronizing between 45 and 50GB of data each day. The bandwidth and throughput usage are controlled via Riverbed quality of service (QoS), which we can increase or decrease at will. Our project offices are now able to connect back to HQ from any location and access all file and network data at LAN speeds."

Data is mirrored to a secondary site using NetApp SnapMirror via an optimized connection between the Steelhead appliances. With this model in place RSHP has a robust disaster recovery solution, ensuring the security of its mission-critical files.

RSHP is now evaluating the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), as it is interested in providing Domain Controllers, DHCP, DNS, and print and file services to its project offices. The RSP can run up to five additional services and applications virtually on VMware in a protected partition on the Steelhead appliance. This allows local services such as print, DNS and DHCP to be deployed in branch offices without the need for servers to run the applications.