UK Firm Stobart Group Deploys 14 Riverbed Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced that Stobart Group, a UK provider of multimodal transport and logistics solutions, deployed 14 Riverbed Steelhead appliances and the Central Management Console (CMC) across its UK operations. As a result, time taken to access files has dropped by 60 percent and bandwidth utilization has been reduced three-fold, from 90 percent to 30 percent. These results have allowed Stobart Group to build a private cloud, consolidating data from six business units into one centralized location and removing 30 local servers, while avoiding a costly bandwidth upgrade and improving employee collaboration and productivity.

Stobart Group is establishing itself as the UK’s front-runner in the rapidly developing multimodal freight, logistics and warehousing sectors. The Group consists of Stobart Ports, Stobart Air and Stobart Rail Divisions. The company employs over 5,300 people and operates more than 1,850 tractor units and drawbars, 3,000 trailers and approximately 6 million square feet of high specification warehousing at locations across the UK.

As Vince Sparks, IT director at Stobart Group, explained: "We had experienced rapid growth through acquisition and needed to consolidate six business units into one company. As part of that program we planned to move the various distributed IT systems to one centralized location and create a private cloud infrastructure. But we knew we had to offset the limitations of moving from a local area network (LAN) to a wide area network (WAN)."

Stobart Group did consider upgrading its bandwidth, but following discussions with its IT provider the company chose to investigate a WAN optimization solution instead and tested Blue Coat, Cisco and Riverbed. "We thought we could overcome the issue of poor application performance by increasing bandwidth. We now realize that the problem was one of latency, commonly associated with Windows file sharing applications, and that simply adding more bandwidth to our infrastructure would not have solved the issue of poor application performance," said Sparks.

Stobart Group agreed to run an informal trial with Riverbed, and installed Steelhead appliances at three sites. Sparks said: "We saw the benefits by the end of the first day, to the extent that our users contacted our service desk to ask what the improvement had been. They wanted to know what we’d changed in the infrastructure because jobs that had taken them hours and minutes were now taking minutes and seconds. We had set up a temporary site for our management team during renovations to the main site. The Steelhead appliances made it possible for them to work effectively from that remote site, something that previously had been almost impossible."

Following the success of the informal trial with Riverbed, the entire IT team was keen to progress with formal trials, where they found that the other vendors did not meet the needs of the organization. The Group based its selection process on two measurement factors – overall improvement to application performance over the WAN, and ease of deployment and management. "We really needed ‘plug and play’ technology as we don’t have a large IT team, so we wanted a solution that would just deliver results for us with little set up and maintenance. It became clear that the other vendors could not deliver the same results or a solution that was as simple to manage as Riverbed," said Sparks.

In addition to enabling Stobart Group to remove 30 local servers and migrate its IT services to a private cloud infrastructure, the Riverbed solution allowed the Group to avoid a costly bandwidth upgrade and improved employee collaboration and productivity. Other benefits include the removal of local data backups, resulting in improved efficiency of the IT department, reduced administration costs and increased file security, as data can now be backed up over the WAN to a disaster recovery (DR) site.

"Riverbed has really allowed us to achieve our plans for consolidation without adding unnecessary cost or complexity to our existing IT infrastructure," said Sparks. "Riverbed is now a critical part of our organization."