Australian Legal Firm Griffith Hack Chooses Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that Griffith Hack, an Australian intellectual property (IP) firm of patent and trademark attorneys, with offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile to centralize its infrastructure, enable disaster recovery and reduce bandwidth costs.

Andrew Pritchett, CIO, Griffith Hack, says the firm’s national network was decentralized for email, documents and backups. To support an IT centralization initiative, Griffith Hack worked with reseller O2 Networks to install Steelhead appliances at Griffith Hack’s offices at each site.

As a result of the Riverbed deployment, the firm has experienced improved application performance between its data center in Melbourne and offices in Brisbane, Perth and Sydney. Now able to continuously replicate to its disaster recovery site, Griffith Hack is experiencing improved data recovery times, boasting a one hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for its primary system.

"The primary driver for our investment in Riverbed was to support the centralization and replication of our infrastructure, enabling a simpler IT architecture while improving the end user experience and disaster recovery capabilities," explains Pritchett. "With the Riverbed solution, we are able to maximize the use of our existing bandwidth and provide the firm with better disaster recovery and backup capabilities. The poor performance delivered by our previous, unaccelerated network architecture required our users to run several remote desktop protocol sessions and log on multiple times, which was confusing, slow and frustrating."

Since installing the Riverbed Steelhead appliances, Griffith Hack has removed more than 30 servers from its network, simplifying operations for IT staff.

"We have a small WAN, from which we needed to extract a lot of value before the current contract expired," Pritchett says. "The cost of the Riverbed investment – which equated to approximately four months of WAN costs – meant we didn’t need to add bandwidth. We saw an ROI within four months, with the added benefit of performance enhancements for users and simplicity for the IT team."

Griffith Hack chose Riverbed based on the confidence Pritchett had that the solution would actually work. "Riverbed came recommended by my peers, which is very important to me," Pritchett explains. "Also, the way Riverbed handles data is different from other vendors, with its de-duplication capabilities allowing us to optimise storage capacity tenfold – for example, managing about 1TB of data in a 100GB store. The products are also very simple to set up and maintain, which is key for a small IT team like ours."