Oil and Gas Company Bill Barrett Deploys Riverbed

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced Bill Barrett Corporation, an oil and natural gas exploration and development company, is using Riverbed Granite branch converged infrastructure to speed remote site DR and shrink restore times to minutes.

The Granite solution enables Bill Barrett to consolidate servers and storage in the datacenter and streamline IT management, without sacrificing any of the benefits of having servers at the edge close to users. Bill Barrett now centrally protects and secures data while lowering the TCO of remote branch offices.

Bill Barrett faced several challenges managing IT resources on-site at remote branch offices for active exploration and development properties in Colorado, UT and Wyoming. Aging infrastructure was difficult to support and inconsistent server and backups at these remote sites made recovery uncertain and put data at risk. In addition, slow applications and data availability issues made remote workers less productive.

Trace3, a systems integrator and Riverbed partner, introduced the Granite solution to Bill Barrett, highlighting its approach at eliminating the headaches of branch office IT. After a short trial, Bill Barrett saw the distinct and advantage of delivering remote IT with the Granite solution and how it would lower the TCO of branch offices.

“In the past, where remote site backup was inconsistent or non-existent, we had to tell our employees that recovery was not possible, and they had to recreate the files that were lost. This impacted productivity and frustrated employees,” said Jerry Vigil, director of IT operations, Bill Barrett. “With Riverbed Granite, we have simplified and centralized the management of backups to the datacenter, allowing us to recover data in minutes versus hours or even days. With Granite, we have cut 67% of the cost of replacing servers and storage in our branch offices and remote sites and have recognized additional cost savings by eliminating the need to contract third-party IT support for remote sites.“

With Granite, Bill Barrett reduces risk and improves security without sacrificing the performance needed by employees in edge locations. The company can centrally provision, upgrade and patch branch systems and resume operations with minimal disruption. The deployment of Steelhead WAN optimization in conjunction with Granite also provides remote workers with better performance for centralized business critical applications, including SharePoint and Exchange, as well as VoIP.

“The combined solution of Riverbed Granite and Steelhead was a very strategic investment for us. Looking ahead, we now have a blueprint for expandability based on our business plans, and Riverbed sits at the very center of it,” concluded Vigil.

Riverbed Granite and Steelhead
Granite is a branch converged infrastructure solution that eliminates the headache of branch office IT, consolidating servers and storage into the datacenter without sacrificing any of the benefits of having servers at the edge close to users. It expedites branch office provisioning, backup and recovery and ensures continuous operations when disasters occur from any cause – weather, fire or accident. Businesses can restore branch operations in a matter of minutes vs. days, centrally protect and secure data in the datacenter and lower the TCO of branch and remote offices.

Steelhead is a WAN optimization solution that accelerates the delivery of applications to the branch and from the cloud and allows IT to prioritize delivery of mission-critical applications over the fastest networks. Riverbed is currently the only vendor positioned in the leaders quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization controllers and has been recognized as a leader in this report for six years in a row. With Steelhead, Riverbed began WAN optimization in 2004 with innovations for application and data streamlining across the WAN and Internet to deliver the best end-user experience regardless of location, network or device while reducing network bandwidth. With Steelhead, SaaS apps can be delivered up to 33x faster while using 97% less bandwidth. As a result, Steelhead has become critical to Microsoft Office 365 deployments with over one million users being accelerated to date.

Granite and Riverbed Steelhead are part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform,  a platform for location-independent computing. It is a set of integrated software solution that give companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that serve the business while ensuring the flawless delivery of those apps to better leverage global resources, reduce the cost of running their business and maximize employee productivity.