Provider of Professional Services BDO Canada Adopted Riverbed

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that BDO Canada, LLP, provider of professional services, has adopted its SteelFusion as the foundation for an agile IT environment capable of supporting the firm’s merger and acquisitions strategy.

SteelFusion technology made the process of deploying infrastructure at remote sites simpler by enabling local office servers to be up and running in minutes. With SteelFusion, all local office data has been converged in the firm’s data center, replacing all-night backups with quick data center updates to deliver the application performance. According to the firm, data security has been increased, while IT travel time has been reduced, resulting in the migration of its local offices to SteelFusion at a rate of about 25 offices/year.

BDO has more than 125 offices, from Vancouver to St. John’s, with locations ranging from major urban centers to more rural communities. An MPLS WAN connects the offices to a data center in Toronto where the firm’s business-critical software applications are housed.

BDO became a Riverbed customer years ago when the firm adopted Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization to boost application performance over the WAN. Since then, the firm’s IT strategy has continued to evolve to better serve the growing organization.

“We have very tight mergers and acquisitions timelines,” explained Bruno Petitti, senior manager, IT systems and infrastructure, BDO. “Part of my job is making sure IT is agile enough to run with the business.“

A key part of that effort involves an upgrade to the local-office IT infrastructure. Previously, each office had its own servers and storage yet very few had IT expertise on-site. Given the remote nature of some of the offices, staff were often required to travel to these locations and keep the equipment up and running. When a critical piece of equipment went down, revenue for that office would come to a halt while employees waited for someone from IT to arrive. If replacement parts were needed, that could add 24 to 48 hours to the downtime.

Each office backed up a large amount of information to the data center nightly. Often this process continued into the next day, leading to user complaints about application performance. In addition, enhancing security around corporate and client data was a priority for Petitti’s team. Having local offices’ data stored on-site also posed problems for their continuity in the event of disasters such as fires and floods.

When the IT team learned about SteelFusion software-defined edge solution, they realized it would address their office concerns. Using SteelFusion, BDO could converge remote storage, server, backup and networking infrastructure into one appliance while securing 100% of its data in its Toronto data center and delivering application performance as if the data resided locally.

The rollout process for the SteelFusion appliance takes about 30 minutes.

“Someone local will go rack and stack, and then give it an IP address. Once that’s done, everything else is done remotely through my team here at our national office,” said Giri Shanmugarajah, BDO Canada’s manager of IT systems and infrastructure.

When mergers and acquisitions bring new offices into the company, much less IT time is required to integrate them into the standardized IT environment since SteelFusion automatically consolidates all edge infrastructure into the data center.

Petitti is exploring a way to eliminate the typical bottleneck of buying and allocating storage for new offices by using SteelFusion in conjunction with Microsoft Azure StorSimple instead of SAN storage in the data center.

“The support for StorSimple is another way Riverbed is helping us improve our agility,” he said.

Having office data stored safely in the data center has eliminated the worry about theft.

“If someone walks out with a SteelFusion appliance, they really don’t get anything,” explained Claude Vezina, BDO’s manager of network security. And SteelFusion ensures that when a local office shuts down unexpectedly, all work doesn’t have to stop.Employees can just VPN from home. For our team, it takes less than five minutes to give them access to all of their data as if they were right there in the office, enhancing our BC.

Riverbed Delivers Solutions for Cloud and Digital World
The firm is delivering solutions to help companies transition from legacy hardware to a software-defined and cloud-centric approach to networking, and improve end user experience, allowing enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives to reach their potential. Its integrated platform delivers the agility, visibility, and performance businesses need to be successful in a cloud and digital world. By leveraging company’s platform, organizations can deliver apps, data, and services from any public, private, or hybrid cloud across any network to any end-point.

Riverbed SteelFusion enables a software-defined edge by bringing together virtualization, intelligent storage caching, and WAN optimization into a single hyperconverged infrastructure solution that meets both the needs of the enterprise as well as the needs of branch employees for performing applications that simply work so they can do their jobs.

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