Wells Fargo/ABD Insurance Deploys Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that ABD Insurance & Financial Services (ABDI) has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in its two data centers and at each of its 14 branch offices. ABDI obtained a return on investment in 10 months while reducing bandwidth usage, improving disaster recovery processes, and accelerating access to email for more than 800 employees.

ABDI provides insurance brokerage, risk management, and employee benefits consulting solutions and services in the United States. Formed in 1990, the company grew to the 14th largest insurance brokerage in the nation prior to its acquisition by Wells Fargo in 2007. As a financial services company, it is critical for ABDI to keep customer data centralized and secure, while also ensuring that the data is quickly accessible by employees in remote offices. However, the distance between its centralized data and branch offices led employees to experience slow response times when accessing customer data and communicating with team members in dispersed offices via email. In addition, the large amount of data that was distributed to and from dispersed offices in a day could not be backed up within 24 hours. This presented a major obstacle for ABDI’s disaster recovery (DR) efforts, as data replication times were exceeding seven days.

“We needed a solution that would not only improve our disaster recovery efforts but also improve our productivity,” said Jerome Keller, data center manager at ABDI. “Our regional offices were requesting major network upgrades, which included doubling the number of T1 lines and adding a new DS3. However, we knew that adding more bandwidth wouldn’t take care of latency issues.”

The company decided to look into WAN optimization. After an independent lab evaluation of WAN optimization alternatives from Cisco, Blue Coat and Riverbed, the company selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances due to their simplicity of deployment, ease-of-management and performance. As a result of its Steelhead appliance deployment, ABDI accelerated and streamlined its backup and replication processes, reducing its backup times by 85 percent and achieving a 70 percent reduction in bandwidth utilization. ABDI exceeded the company’s stringent end-to-end throughput requirements with Steelhead appliances, achieving Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of four hours and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of two hours that was required to protect the company’s assets and improve its business continuity processes.

“Selecting WAN optimization was an easy choice, but Riverbed really made the difference,” said Keller. “By reducing our backup time to 24 hours, Riverbed helped ensure our data was secure. Previously, when data took up to a week to back up, all of our client information was at risk. In the event of a disaster, our company would have had to resort to backup tapes and NetApp replication.”

The Steelhead deployment has also enabled ABDI branch office employees to quickly access data and critical business applications, such as email, Microsoft SQL, SAP BusinessObjects and Vertafore-Sagitta.