LONDON, Apr. 17, 2012 — Silver Peak Systems , the leader in data centre class wide area network (WAN) optimization, today announced that its technology will play an integral role in the 2012 Virgin London Marathon as part of information technology (IT) consulting firm Marathon Information Technology Systems’ (ITS) strategy to support the prestigious event.
One of the world’s leading city marathons which sees approximately 37,000 runners descend on the capital city every April, the Virgin London Marathon is a hugely complicated logistical operation. Marathon ITS has been successfully delivering all of the IT capabilities to the race for more than 10 years, as well as providing the London Marathon organization with its business-critical IT systems. In the weeks prior to the race and through to its finish, the Marathon ITS team must sustain basic services for hundreds of event support staff and press, including email, file sharing, web access, and race-specific information such as runner databases and event statistics.
Using Citrix XenApp to deliver IT services throughout the event, random drops in throughput can make it difficult to access vital race information in real-time, as the virtualized service is susceptible to fluctuations in WAN quality. By utilizing Silver Peak’s virtual WAN optimization solution, Marathon ITS can drastically improve network quality between sites, allowing high priority traffic like Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) sessions to be prioritized and guaranteed available resources. Silver Peak’s appliance also maximizes available bandwidth, making an existing 10 megabit-per-second (Mbps) connection perform like a 100 Mbps dedicated WAN link. Silver Peak also provides detailed visibility into bandwidth, latency, and loss characteristics, which helps Marathon ITS rapidly isolate and correct network issues in real time.
“Maintaining network consistency between the event base operating out of a local hotel, while critical applications and data remain in the London Marathon’s main offices a few miles away, presents a variety of challenges,” explained Paul Speck, sales director at Marathon ITS. “With Silver Peak’s WAN optimization technology, we can be sure that we are delivering the highest level of network performance in the most cost-effective manner. Working to tight timescales, we also have a flexible solution that is incredibly easy-to-deploy, and able to work seamlessly with whatever hardware platforms we have available on site.”
Silver Peak’s high performance WAN optimization technology was selected specifically for its flexible, cost-effective, and real-time network optimization techniques. These include Network Acceleration to overcome WAN latency, Network Integrity to correct packet delivery loss issues and prioritise time sensitive traffic, and Network Memory to maximize WAN bandwidth utilization.
“To deploy a dedicated WAN circuit between two locations for the duration of the Virgin London Marathon would cost tens-of-thousands of pounds,” continued Speck. "As most service providers require a minimum commitment of one-to-two years for such a WAN connection, we would be locked into paying for telco services well beyond the 12 days required, which is simply too cost prohibitive. Our job is to make sure all eyes are on the runners when the race is in progress, not on an hour glass in the corner of their laptops. With Silver Peak, we can achieve that goal, making WAN optimization technology an indispensible part of our IT strategy for future Virgin London Marathons.”
“Business-critical IT solutions like WAN optimization are paramount in delivering seamless network performance, especially where virtual services are concerned,” said Larry Cormier, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Silver Peak. “We are thrilled to be working with Marathon ITS on this long-standing project and feel privileged to be the backbone of such a prominent event in the global sports calendar, offering both the necessary flexibility and cost-savings in a demanding IT environment.”
Live Webinar Highlights Marathon Deployment
Silver Peak and Marathon ITS will host a live webinar on Thur., April 19th at 14:00 GMT describing in detail the IT requirements for the Virgin London Marathon. Click here to register .
About Marathon ITS
With over 25 years combined experience, Marathon ITS is a tried and tested information technology partner of choice for many high profile businesses and organizations. Our breadth of knowledge and skills mean we offer our clients strategic long term business partnerships aimed at delivering faster and more efficient IT systems, designed to help clients benefit from a consolidated, more productive, lower cost IT infrastructure.
About Silver Peak Systems, Inc.
Silver Peak is the leader in data center class WAN optimization. The company’s Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) delivers unprecedented scalability and flexibility, enabling rapid deployment of WAN optimization anywhere and on any platform or hypervisor. 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 .