Exego Group “Improves WAN Performance by 350%” With Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that Exego Group, supplier to the automotive industry in Australia and New Zealand, has revved up the performance of its IT infrastructure more than threefold with Riverbed.

Exego Group has four main business units, the most well-known being Repco, the largest automotive parts and aftermarket accessories reseller and supplier in Australia and New Zealand. Repco operates a network of 369 stores and a team of more than 4,000 employees across the region, stocking more than 175,000 automotive parts and accessories – from trailers and roof racks for the family car, to specialist engines and the management equipment for the mechanic’s workshop. Exego Group’s other business units – Ashdown-Ingram, McLeod Accessories and Motospecs – are well-respected suppliers to the motor vehicle and motorcycle trade.

Working closely with Riverbed partner XSI Data Solutions, Exego Group deployed 17 Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its wide area network (WAN), resulting in more than threefold improvement in application performance – primarily for e-mail communications – while at the same time reducing the need for more expensive broadband links to connect its offices on both sides of the Tasman. Exego Group has also deployed 30 licenses of Riverbed Steelhead Mobile for its travelling executives.

"We are continually updating our network to create a more efficient IT infrastructure," says Exego Group’s technical services manager for Australia and New Zealand, Garry Cleaver. "With limited bandwidth, both in-country and internationally, we wanted to improve the performance of existing and future applications, without having to buy more bandwidth."

"After comparing the functionality of WAN optimization offerings from multiple vendors, it was clear that Riverbed gave us the performance benefits and ease-of-deployment we needed, at the right price point. We felt that Riverbed gave us a broad optimization solution — not only for email communications but also other critical applications. The improved performance Riverbed delivers has allowed us to implement additional applications with no performance problems or additional WAN costs," said Cleaver.

Since deploying the Riverbed Steelhead appliances, Exego Group has quantified a total data reduction across its network of 61 percent, hitting peaks of up to 80 percent for various applications. Overall bandwidth capacity has increased 2.6X, while network performance gains of up to 3.5X across the network are now commonplace. In one example, 15 users experienced performance issues with Lotus Notes until the Steelhead appliances were installed. With the Riverbed deployment, the email application performance problem for those users has been solved by effectively tripling the WAN throughput, making a 512Kb link perform as if it was 1.5Mb. Exego Group currently routes almost 200GB of Lotus Notes traffic across its WAN at any one time.

Improving Communications for the Mobile Workforce
Because of increased bandwidth usage by mobile executives, Exego Group also deployed Steelhead Mobile as an extension of its branch-based Steelhead appliances.

"Our executive teams use 3G wireless connectivity on the road, which can be very expensive to run, especially when they’re working with large files and having to share them with other teams," says Cleaver. "As with the initial Steelhead appliance deployment, we’ve found it very easy to extend the performance and cost benefits of bandwidth optimization to our mobile workers with Steelhead Mobile. Our mobile laptop users truly notice improved application performance while they are on the road."

"From an administrative perspective it couldn’t be easier, because any new devices are automatically ‘sensed’ and configured by the Steelhead appliances and instantly become part of the extended network," Cleaver adds. "The biggest change from what we had before is that activity peaks have essentially been ‘flattened’; whereas previously during busy periods network activity would peak sporadically, those peaks are much flatter now since we are using less bandwidth, resulting in overall performance improvements across the board."