Leading Specialty Machine Manufacturer JOA Leverages Silver Peak to Solve International Collaboration Challenges

NX Appliances Enable Real-time Sharing of CAD files between United States and Europe

Mountain View, CA, July 24, 2006 – Silver Peak Systems ( www.silver-peak.com ), a leading provider of scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration solutions, today announced that Curt G. Joa (“JOA”), a global designer and manufacturer of specialty machines, has deployed Silver Peak’s NX Series appliances to improve remote collaboration and real-time information exchange between the company’s offices in the United States and Europe.  By dramatically improving employees’ ability to share large CAD files and design images across extended WAN links, JOA has increased its design team’s productivity and enhanced collaboration across different geographically dispersed locations.  From prototyping and design to manufacturing and test, the Silver Peak appliances have shortened development cycles while improving the efficiency of the company’s day to day business operations.

JOA’s wide variety of “engineered to order” machines are deployed in over 55 countries worldwide, and the nature of its  business requires real-time interaction between employees, contractors, and customers.  These individuals are constantly sharing exceptionally large files across JOA’s international WAN, including 2D and 3D models, simulations, prototype drawings, and other project files created using Autocad, Solid Edge, and other advanced design tools.  The company relies heavily on its Novell file servers (with Microsoft clients) and Microsoft email as a way of sharing business critical information between its main corporate facilities in Wisconsin and Germany. 

The Right WAN Design
Given the difficulty of browsing, opening, and saving CAD files across the WAN, JOA’s remote design engineers were strongly advocating the deployment of local servers in the company’s European headquarters in Germany.  However, the company resisted this move for a variety of reasons, including cost savings and better risk management through centralized storage backup.  To overcome the “unbearable performance delays” caused by the WAN and to allow their European engineers to work more efficiently with their American counterparts, JOA explored a variety of WAN acceleration solutions.

Experiments with traditional compression solutions left JOA under whelmed, as they delivered negligible bandwidth improvements and did not address the high latency on JOA’s WAN – the source of most of their performance problems.  The company also looked at Wide Area File Services (WAFS), but quickly learned that leading solutions did little for Novell file services, and were not designed to accelerate other applications in the JOA environment, including email and ERP.

JOA turned to Silver Peak’s NX family of appliances.  With Silver Peak’s Network Memory™ technology, JOA was realized a 60x improvement in application performance by delivering duplicate information from local data stores on Silver Peak appliances.  Silver Peak also removed the impact of latency, which was drastically slowing down applications running over JOA’s international WAN.

As a result of the Silver Peak deployment, opening and saving files, which used to take an average of one hour across JOA’s WAN, now take just seconds.  3D files, which used to take two to three hours to transfer, now can be accessed in less than one minute.   

“The performance difference is remarkable,” said Pat Wagner, MIS Manager at JOA.  “We’ve actually received written testimonials from remote users commending us on the improvements we’ve made to our WAN.” 

From modeling to manufacturing, Silver Peak has become an essential tool for remote collaboration and real-time information exchange throughout the JOA environment.

About Curt G. Joa
Curt G. Joa (“JOA”) is a privately held specialty machine builder based in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.  For 70 years, the company has been a leader in the design and manufacture of custom machinery designed for the production of disposable hygiene products, including diapers, sanitary napkins, medical equipment, and related products. 

JOA has extensive experience in the field of high-speed web-based product manufacturing. This includes process and product development capabilities, concept validation, and testing expertise.  Hundreds of businesses have turned to JOA to create a wide variety of “engineered to order” machines, with deployments in over 55 countries throughout the world.

About Silver Peak Systems, Inc .
Based in Mountain View, Calif., Silver Peak enables enterprises to centralize branch office infrastructure and improve application performance across a Wide Area Network (WAN).  The company pioneered Local Instance Networking (LIN), a technology that enables companies to improve disaster recovery in data centers and reduce “server sprawl” in branch and remote offices.  The innovative technology achieves exceptional, transparent performance improvements for all enterprise applications, including file services, email, web, and real-time applications such as Citrix and VOIP.  The company was founded in 2004 and has received funding from investors like Benchmark Capital, Greylock Ventures and Duff, Ackerman and Goodrich.  For more information, visit  http://www.silver-peak.com/infocenter .

NOTE: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, Network Memory and Silver Peak NX Series are trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc.