Ferries may be convenient and relaxing for passengers, but for IT professionals they present unique challenges. The lack of IT personnel on the ship and the limited bandwidth at sea mean wide area network (WAN) problems cannot be easily rectified by simply “upping the bandwidth.” So when Viking Line engineers saw their ship-based point-of-sale and business systems slow down, and operational delays and customer complaints mount, they knew they needed a different kind of approach.
Silver Peak and its partner, Decens, were turned to for assistance. Silver Peak’s WAN acceleration software optimizes any enterprise application used by a cruise operator out-of-the-box. Viking Line deployed Silver Peak WAN acceleration on its ferries and at the data center. Not only did Silver Peak outperform the competition (such as Riverbed and Blue Coat), eliminating on average 40 percent of Viking Line’s transferred data from the WAN, but deployment was fast and the price was right:
“We were contacted by other WAN optimization vendors before we chose Silver Peak,” says Kaj Sundström, manager of network and communication, at Viking Line. “But during our testing Silver Peak proved to be the fastest, easiest and least expensive solution to deploy.” he says.