SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 3, 2012 — The Greenery trading company is a leading European market supplier of a full range of fresh fruit and vegetables, also offering a package of support services including logistics and marketing activities. During peak hours, The Greenery found it difficult to communicate and collaborate between its main campus in Barendrecht and several locations throughout Holland. The Greenery solved its challenges using data center class wide area network (WAN) optimization from Silver Peak Systems.
Core applications like Microsoft file transfer manager, Exchange, and Web access became slow, which hampered employee productivity. The company had also invested in Citrix virtual desktops as a way of controlling IT costs, but was not maximizing the return-on-investment (ROI) in this technology as poor performance hampered usability over the low-quality WAN. At the same time, the quality of The Greenery’s Cisco IP telephony suffered due to network congestion, while regular server backups could not complete on time.
“Our existing bandwidth capacity simply wasn’t enough to keep pace with our business needs,” said Anand Kichari, architect of technical infrastructure at The Greenery. “When things slowed down, the business suffered and we needed to make a change.”
The company explored doing a complete WAN upgrade, but quickly found it was cost-prohibitive. Doubling bandwidth in just three locations (Breda, Hoogkarspel and Zaltbommel) would cost the company an additional 20,000 Euros per year in telecommunications costs. Upgrading the hardware infrastructure would add even more expense.
Instead, The Greenery turned to WAN optimization from Silver Peak as a way of cost-effectively increasing WAN capacity without upgrading the WAN infrastructure. With the help of IPknowledge , an established organization with experience in the design, implementation, and management of networking solutions, The Greenery deploying a mix of Silver Peak NX WAN optimization appliances. The results included an 18-times reduction in WAN traffic, 6-times performance improvement for Web traffic, 3-times performance improvement for file transfers, and a doubling of performance for Citrix virtual desktops—all achieved using the existing WAN infrastructure. Silver Peak’s application agnostic architecture has also prepared The Greenery for any future initiatives and applications, both TCP and non-TCP.
“For less money than a WAN upgrade, we got substantially more WAN capacity using Silver Peak,” said Kichari. “The Silver Peak appliances improved visibility into our traffic and ensured optimal performance across all network resources. Perhaps most importantly, calls to the help desk dropped substantially once Silver Peak was in place, which made IT operations go a lot smoother.”
About Silver Peak Systems, Inc.
Silver Peak is the leader in data center class WAN optimization appliances that maximize WAN performance while minimizing WAN costs. The company’s Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) delivers unprecedented scalability and flexibility, enabling rapid deployment of WAN optimization on any platform, any hypervisor, anywhere within an enterprise. Silver Peak’s WAN optimization solutions are strategic enablers for large IT initiatives, including data center consolidation, data migration, cloud computing, disaster recovery, server centralization, and hosted virtual desktops (VDI). For more information, visit the Silver Peak InfoCenter or follow Silver Peak on Twitter , Facebook , YouTube , LinkedIn , and the WAN Speak Blog .