Groupe Mornay With Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced that Groupe MORNAY, a Paris-based social welfare company, has selected and deployed 16 Riverbed Steelhead appliances and the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC) as part of a managed service offering from Orange Business Services. The Riverbed deployment resulted in a 10x reduction in bandwidth utilization, which has enabled the company to cut bandwidth costs by 30 percent. In addition, file transfer times have been reduced by as much as 85 percent, resulting in improved employee productivity.

Groupe MORNAY is a French player in the social welfare sector, providing complementary pension schemes and group and individual protection to approximately 200,000 companies and 2.5 million people across France.

Prior to the Riverbed deployment, Groupe MORNAY users at remote sites began to complain of poor application performance, which was affecting their productivity. In addition, in an effort to reduce overall IT costs and improve the manageability of data and applications, Groupe MORNAY’s IT center, ARAMICE, planned to consolidate its data and applications into a central data center.

ARAMICE first attempted to solve the user performance issues by increasing bandwidth at remote sites to 45Mbps. However, the increase had little impact on application performance and users continued to complain about slow download times. It was at this point that Groupe MORNAY’s service provider, Orange Business Services, introduced the company to Riverbed and its WAN optimization solutions.

Working with Orange, ARAMICE extensively tested offerings from Cisco, Packeteer (now Blue Coat), Expand and Riverbed. Following this testing, Groupe MORNAY deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at 16 locations.

Groupe MORNAY also deployed the CMC, which simplifies the process of deploying, configuring and managing Steelhead appliances while providing visibility into the underlying performance of applications running across the WAN.

According to Philippe Etourneau, architecture and infrastructure director at Groupe MORNAY, the company chose Riverbed because its Steelhead appliances delivered the best performance for all tests completed, including a simple installation process, the best acceleration of applications and ease of management.

"We had very high expectations of any WAN optimization solution," said Etourneau. "Our core requirements were that the product be non-intrusive and require no changes to our existing configuration. We also needed a solution that provided maximum transparency in terms of application and network behavior, while delivering the best performance across all of our critical applications. Riverbed delivered on all our requirements better than the other vendors."

The deployment has allowed Groupe MORNAY to reduce bandwidth costs by 30 percent. In addition, the time taken to download files has been reduced from 15 minutes to two and a half to three minutes, resulting in improved user satisfaction and productivity. According to Etourneau, "After the Riverbed deployment, users enthusiastically contacted the IT department spontaneously to find out what was going on and why their applications were so fast. We’ve seen major productivity gains and a clear improvement in working conditions at our regional sites."