Stena Drills Reduces Bandwidth With Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that Stena Drilling, provider and operator of offshore drilling rigs and drillships, has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile at various onshore and offshore locations worldwide.

The deployment has allowed Stena to avoid both a costly bandwidth upgrade as well as additional investment in IT infrastructure. At the same time, Stena has seen a 30x improvement in file download times and enhanced staff collaboration.

Ian Fraser, IT manager at Stena, explains: "Prior to the installation of the Steelhead appliances, we were looking at increasing our bandwidth from a 512Kbps connection to a 1Mbps connection. This would have almost doubled our IT infrastructure costs. Riverbed is one of the few technologies we’ve found that has helped us to cut overall IT infrastructure costs while improving overall employee productivity and collaboration. We’re extremely pleased with these results."

Stena Drilling is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Swedish company Stena AB, one of the world’s foremost independent drilling contractors. The company is headquartered in Scotland, with offshore drilling rigs located across the globe. The worldwide spread of its staff and operations meant that Stena was investing considerable amounts of money on satellite connections without the ability to utilize all of the accessible bandwidth.

To help solve this problem Stena had already implemented a data prioritization system that gave precedence to important communication channels such as email and VoIP. However, this approach offered no real-time acceleration. Following a recommendation from an IT executive at a major oil company that is a Riverbed customer, Stena’s IT organization contacted the Riverbed value-added reseller EssentialNET and distributor, Zycko, for recommendations on WAN optimization solutions. Due to the nature of Stena’s drilling operations, with most of the sites located offshore, a combination of Riverbed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile was proposed.

The companies teamed up to run a one-month trial between headquarters and the Stena Spey rig in the North Sea. The trial was so successful that Stena initiated the installation of Steelhead appliances on all of its rigs worldwide. As Fraser explains: "We saw an immediate improvement and were delighted with the reduced time taken to download files. A 2MB file used to take five minutes to download; now, with Riverbed, it takes just 10 seconds."

Stena has also seen a 2.5x increase in bandwidth capacity, which has enabled the company to avoid a costly bandwidth upgrade. Fraser comments: "Riverbed has actually provided us with faster application download speeds than we would have experienced had we just doubled the bandwidth capacity."

Stena has now deployed nine Steelhead appliances throughout its worldwide rig and at various onshore locations.