Home » News » Riverbed chosen over Cisco WAAS and Packeteer

Riverbed chosen over Cisco WAAS and Packeteer

January 23rd, 2008 by Tredent

Riverbed Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates, a nationally recognized transportation and transit system design and development firm, successfully deployed Riverbed Steelhead(R) appliances at its five offices nationwide and Steelhead Mobile to half of its employees. With minimal operational investment from its IT staff, Nelson/Nygaard increased productivity by delivering LAN-like speed to distributed employees, including those in branch offices and on the road. Nelson/Nygaard chose Riverbed(R) over Cisco WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) and others because of its market-leading acceleration capabilities for both remote offices and mobile workers, and its ease of installation and management.

Nelson/Nygaard serves clients across the globe, and provides transportation specialists with expertise in transit service, accessible and specialized transportation, multi-modal transportation, smart growth projects and transit-oriented development, program management, financial planning, and public participation and information. To ensure that professional expertise can be applied regardless of an employee’s location, teams are built across regions. As projects are designed and implemented, employees from different offices collaborate on large 30-50 megabyte documents such as AutoCAD, ESRI and Adobe files. At any given time the company can expect at least half of its employees to be traveling — to a job site, at a client location, or anywhere in between — requiring fast access to very large files. For mobile workers, files would often take longer than five minutes each to download, hindering productivity and resulting in the frustration of many mobile users who would frequently complain to IT.

“With so many users working from branch offices and a myriad of remote locations, IT was constantly receiving complaints about wide area network (WAN) performance and its ability to handle the large files we work with,” said Raj Singh, chief information officer and partner at Nelson/Nygaard. “Employees were getting so frustrated that they were taking matters into their own hands and buying hard drives for branch offices — creating insecure copies of data. Given that we’re an IT team of three, that just wasn’t a situation we could live with long-term. We needed a solution that we could get up and running easily, and manage without too much effort.”

Nelson/Nygaard decided to evaluate WAN optimization solutions from Riverbed, Cisco and Packeteer by holding its own extensive in-house bake-off between the products. “We first asked a Cisco partner to demonstrate its WAAS offering, but it became apparent immediately that Cisco’s products were too difficult to manage, even in a relatively small test environment. We were able to get Packeteer up and running, but realized that the device is merely a souped-up Windows server, and we weren’t about to add more Windows servers throughout our infrastructure and inherit the headaches of updating and maintaining them,” said Singh.

“With Riverbed, both their Steelhead appliances and their Steelhead Mobile software just worked right out of the box. Within a week of selecting Riverbed we had appliances deployed throughout all five of our offices, and Steelhead Mobile software deployed to half of our workforce. In no time our users were experiencing accelerated performance and greater access to the data they needed the most. Not only did it work quickly, but the performance is amazing, and it is extremely easy to manage,” Singh continued.

After IT deployed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile, Nelson/Nygaard employees recognized the difference immediately. Files that once took more than five minutes to download when working in branch offices or remotely now take only two seconds, making download speeds that were once unbearable almost unnoticeable.

In addition, employees who were previously unable to effectively work from home when working on a tight deadline can now access files and information just as if they were in the office. Nelson/Nygaard is currently deploying Steelhead Mobile to the remainder of its employees to enable efficient data access and collaboration throughout its entire mobile workforce.