Kamstrup Deployed 17 Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced that Kamstrup, a Danish manufacturer of system solutions for energy metering, deployed 17 Riverbed Steelhead appliances and the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC) in 15 countries around the world. As a result of its Riverbed WAN optimization deployment, Kamstrup was able to consolidate its IT infrastructure and data backup systems into one location at its Denmark headquarters to build a private cloud and reduce costs without impacting its network performance.

Kamstrup is a manufacturer of solutions for metering utilities such as heat, electricity, tap water and natural gas. With its headquarters in Skanderborg, Denmark, Kamstrup employs over 700 employees in 15 global offices, ranging from Denmark, France, Germany, Russia and Spain to the Netherlands and United Arab Emirates, and is represented in 50 countries by use of local agents. To collaborate between geographically dispersed offices, Kamstrup employees most frequently rely upon Microsoft Exchange and CRM System as well as SharePoint.

Kamstrup had a vision to create a private cloud with one IT department located at its Denmark headquarters, but faced the challenge of whether consolidating its IT infrastructure and data backup systems would result in poor application performance for its employees who need to access data and files over its network. Kamstrup looked into potential bandwidth upgrades for its network, but found that this option would not only cost the company a lot of money, but would also not fully address the performance issues employees were having with accessing applications. After researching the options and learning about the benefits of WAN optimization, Kamstrup evaluated Riverbed and one of its competitors to see if Kamstrup’s goals could be met without incurring lost productivity and without having to make financial investments in additional IT infrastructure.

After thorough testing, Kamstrup discovered that the Riverbed Steelhead appliances would deliver the application acceleration it needed to support the consolidation of local servers to a private cloud. As Jesper Lasthein Hansen, IT manager at Kamstrup, explains: "Even though we removed many of our local servers, our application response times have significantly improved. In fact, the time it takes to download files and applications has improved by an average of 60%. In the end, we chose the Steelhead appliance over the competition for its ‘plug and play’ ease-of-use. Even a non-IT person has the capacity to set up these boxes."

After deploying the Steelhead appliances throughout Europe and Asia, Kamstrup has seen application performance and bandwidth reduction, such as a seven times reduction in bandwidth utilization. Hansen says: "Our WAN optimization deployment has enabled us to postpone investments in network bandwidth. We have received a lot of positive feedback from employees working in remote locations who are benefiting from their applications running much faster over our network."

In addition to Riverbed Steelhead appliances, Kamstrup also benefitted from the CMC, a management console that provides control over Steelhead appliance configurations and visibility into how applications are performing across the network. "With the CMC, we have been able to manage the remote appliances from one central location at headquarters," says Hansen. "Using a convenient web-based interface, we’re able to deploy Steelhead appliances, configure, update and monitor them in real-time all in one place." By moving from local backups to centralized backups in Sweden and Norway, Kamstrup has already saved nearly $15,000 in the first year.