CUTTING COSTS WITH RIVERBED SOLUTIONS
Introduction
Organizations of all sizes strive to be more productive and run low
cost operations. Particularly in difficult economic times, many
organizations will evaluate various cost-cutting initiatives in
order to weather the storm. However, enterprises need to be careful
to pursue cost cutting measures that won’t negatively impact
day-to-day operations or constrain long term growth. Employees need
to do their jobs more efficiently than before, so it is vital to
keep IT infrastructure up-to-date. Ideally, organizations should
not make deep cuts in investments that may jeopardize future
growth, such as product improvements or hiring of key
personnel.
Much has been written about Riverbed solutions and their ability to
improve productivity and collaboration across the enterprise.
However, investments in Riverbed products can often be justified
solely on the basis of cost savings. These cost savings can be
achieved without negatively impacting operations – in fact, in
most instances Riverbed products help organizations run better
while cutting costs. Riverbed has thousands of customers, ranging
from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, who are using our
solutions to reduce costs while improving productivity. Many
Riverbed customers have seen a return on investment in just a few
months because of the significant hard cost savings in areas such
as bandwidth reduction and IT consolidation.
This paper explores how enterprises can use Riverbed solutions to
cut hard costs and make the most of their existing infrastructure,
without negatively impacting their operations.
What is the Riverbed Solution?
Riverbed is
the pioneer and market and technology leader in WAN Optimization,
and offers the first comprehensive solution to a host of problems
that plague enterprise applications operating across the wide area
network, including:
• Poor application performance in distributed environments
• Insufficient, expensive or congested network bandwidth into
remote offices
• Difficulties in successful IT consolidation
• Challenges with slow remote data backup and replication
• Increasing demands of the mobile workforce
Using solutions from Riverbed, enterprises can improve application
performance across the network typically by five to 50 times and in
some cases up to 100 times, and can simultaneously reduce WAN
bandwidth utilization by 65 to 95%. These dramatic results allow
businesses to take advantage of their networks, infrastructure, and
applications in ways they had never imagined possible.
Riverbed solutions accelerate applications by taking an integrated
approach to application performance across the WAN. While some
approaches solely focus on network optimization, or just
concentrate on acceleration for a specific application, Riverbed
solutions improve the performance of all applications running over
TCP and also have application-specific modules that address chatty
application protocols. This combination enables Riverbed solutions
to accelerate the applications that enterprises care about most,
and provides the ability to easily add more functionality over
time.
Riverbed products are architected to scale all the way from the
largest data centers with clustered appliances down to software on
a single user's laptop (or desktop). For organizations looking to
optimize branch office operations, Riverbed offers a full line of
Steelhead® Appliances that can be easily integrated into a
customer’s network. There are thirteen models of Steelhead
Appliances to choose from, based on the bandwidth to the site in
question, the amount of data being used, and the number of desired
TCP connections (roughly proportional to the number of users). For
enterprises that want to improve productivity for their mobile
workers, Riverbed also offers Steelhead Mobile software, which can
be installed on a user’s laptop to optimize that mobile user’s
communications with the data center. In effect, Steelhead Mobile
software turns a user’s laptop into a Steelhead Appliance, so
that mobile users can enjoy the same performance benefits as
workers in a Steelhead-enabled branch office.
• Enable effective branch consolidation
• Cut bandwidth costs
• Improve application performance
• Make IT more effective while spending less
Because Riverbed Steelhead products significantly enhance the
performance of applications over WANs, enterprises can realize
considerable cost savings in addition to productivity improvements.
IDC found that the average payback period for a Riverbed
implementation is 7.3 months.1
Riverbed solutions can cut costs by helping organizations do the
following:
• Reduce bandwidth costs. Using Riverbed to improve network
performance, many organizations can defer WAN bandwidth
upgrades.
Investments in Riverbed solutions can often be justified solely on
bandwidth savings.
• Consolidate infrastructure into the data center. With Riverbed
solutions, enterprises can remove much of the IT infrastructure
(such as file and email servers, SMS servers, SharePoint servers,
tape auto-loaders, and so forth) that sit in branch
offices—without impacting performance.
• Simplify branch office infrastructure. Riverbed offers the
RiOS™ Services Platform (RSP), which enables customers to run
best-of-breed
services on the Steelhead appliance (such as print, IP address
management, and other services). This allows customers to
consolidate their IT even further, making a true “serverless”
branch office a reality.
• Optimize disaster recovery. By improving the performance of a
disaster recovery site, Riverbed solutions can help organizations
save
money and backup their data in a more frequent and reliable
manner.
This paper examines each of these areas in more depth.
Specifically, the paper focuses on the hard cost savings that can
be achieved with Riverbed solutions.
GeoEngineers, Inc., an environmental consulting firm, had
difficulty transferring files between offices. A typical 720 MB
file could take over two hours to transfer from one office to the
other. After deploying Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances in 15
offices, this transfer time was reduced to ten minutes.
On average, GeoEngineers has seen a 3.4x to 4x increase in WAN
capacity with no additional investment in physical capacity.
Steelhead appliances enabled the company to get a virtual 155 Mbps
connection on a connection into the data center that is only 3
Mbps.
As a result, GeoEngineers has been able to save about $400K per
year in bandwidth costs, and their investment in Steelhead
appliances was paid back in
a matter of months.
Productivity improvements, while a very important consideration,
have been well covered in other materials, and are therefore not
the focus of this paper.
Reduce Bandwidth Costs
By deploying Riverbed solutions, many enterprises have avoided
purchasing additional bandwidth. Steelhead appliances on WAN links
will typically reduce WAN traffic by 65% to 95%. That means an
office served by a T1 (1.5 Mbps) could deliver bandwidth equivalent
to between three and 30 Mbps just by adding Steelhead appliances to
the WAN link, without any additional investment in infrastructure.
Bandwidth savings can be significant, and many companies have
justified a payback period of just a few months on bandwidth
savings alone.
For example, GeoEngineers, an architectural and design firm,
realized bandwidth savings of about $400K per year by deploying
Riverbed Steelhead appliances, in addition to significant benefits
in terms of employee productivity and collaboration. According to
Courtenay Bernier, IT manager at GeoEngineers, “the ROI was
obvious to executive management, and payback was just a matter of
months.” Another Riverbed customer, a large manufacturing
company, deployed Steelhead appliances globally and saved $6M in
annual bandwidth costs, generating a payback period of just five
months. A manager in the IT Infrastructure Group at this company
commented: “I wish all IT projects could produce such impressive,
tangible results.”
In addition, the Riverbed Steelhead Mobile product offers further
benefits to enterprises in terms of bandwidth reduction. The
workforce is becoming more mobile – IDC forecasts that nearly 75%
of the workforce in the US will be mobile by 2011, up from 68% in
2006, and that there will be 1 billion mobile workers worldwide.2
Steelhead Mobile optimizes the connections for these mobile
workers, reducing the amount of bandwidth they consume. Piper
Jaffray recently tested the Steelhead Mobile solution with stellar
results: “The performance improvements we achieved with the
Steelhead Mobile software client were nothing less than incredible.
We experienced the largest improvements on Microsoft Word and Excel
files, with performance increases in excess of 30x for both file
types.” In these tests, Piper Jaffray was able to reduce by 50%
the bandwidth required to support mobile users:
“This translates into immediate WAN cost savings.”
In addition to bandwidth savings, Steelhead Mobile can help
companies achieve even more dramatic savings by reducing real
estate and facilities costs. According to one estimate,
“virtual” workers cost 60% less than those based at
headquarters. One barrier for many organizations in making the
workforce more mobile is the difficulty that mobile workers face in
accessing key applications over the WAN. Steelhead Mobile removes
this roadblock.
The key to these dramatic improvements in bandwidth utilization is
Riverbed data streamlining, which removes repetitive traffic from
the WAN. The data streamlining algorithms store all WAN traffic, in
a proprietary form, on disks inside Steelhead products on both
sides of the WAN link. Thereafter, the Steelhead product intercepts
any TCP traffic going across the network, to see if any of that
data has been across the network before. If any of it has been sent
by any application, then only the new data is sent, along with
references to the existing data.
Enable Remote Site Consolidation
Riverbed
solutions also enable consolidation of IT resources and equipment
in branch offices and complement server virtualization initiatives
in the data center. Initially, many enterprises placed servers at
remote sites to deliver consistent application performance to
remote users working with local data sets. Microsoft Exchange
servers, for example, have commonly been deployed at remote sites
with only 20-30 users.
However, provisioning of servers at remote sites is expensive and
the resources are often underutilized. Exchange servers, for
example, are typically resourced for a capacity of several thousand
users, so deploying a dedicated server for a few dozen people is
very costly. This same issue exists for file servers, and web
servers. Worse, all those servers have to be managed, backed up,
repaired, and patched.
By contrast, centralizing servers at a data center delivers clear
cost benefits, including:
• Fewer servers to buy, patch, and upgrade
• Less software to buy, maintain, and upgrade
• Lower electricity bills
• Elimination of off-site media storage and management, for
organizations that consolidate tape backup
• Improved IT staff productivity, including less travel to remote
sites for scheduled (or unscheduled) maintenance and repair
The benefits of centralizing servers are clear – so why hasn’t
every organization done it? WAN application performance is the main
stumbling block. Application performance in remote locations would
suffer greatly for many organizations if servers were consolidated
in the data center. Typical WAN bandwidth at the edge of a network
is only 1% or less of the typical LAN bandwidth, while latency is
often 100 times longer – so while network capacity is 100 times
narrower, latency is 100 times higher.
Riverbed solutions remove this performance problem and enable
organizations to centralize their IT resources. With Riverbed
solutions, organizations no longer need servers at remote sites to
provide acceptable performance to their users.
For example, the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), a
federal agency with 10,000 employees that manages contracts valued
at more than $1.1 trillion, deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances
to enable the consolidation of its data centers from 17 to two. A
Fortune 100 manufacturing company chose Riverbed to enable its
global consolidation efforts, enabling 130,000 users to be
supported by a few data centers. An individual at Rohm and Haas,
another Riverbed customer, summed up the clear value proposition of
their server consolidation effort: “With [Steelhead appliances]
for a remote site in North America, the Active Directory
replications, the Notes replications, file backups, they all are
fast enough that we don’t have to put a file server on location,
which is saving us more money than the solution costs, so it
reduces the payback period to virtually nil.”
Riverbed solutions also complement server consolidation initiatives
that leverage virtualization technology. Server virtualization
allows IT to maximize resource utilization while containing server
sprawl to minimize the physical footprint of hardware in data
centers. This is a clear win in terms of reducing costs; however,
when WANs are involved, applications that worked well on LANs work
poorly, or not at all. Using Riverbed, enterprises can implement
virtualization to consolidate many physical servers in branches
down to just a few in a data center, with no performance hit for
end-users. Riverbed also enables more flexibility when backing up
or moving virtual machines from one location to another by
dramatically reducing the time it takes to complete those tasks.
Many customers have consolidated servers and sites using Riverbed
and VMware together without their end-users ever knowing
applications and data have been moved hundreds or thousands of
miles away.
Enable Branch Office Simplification
In
addition to consolidating remote office equipment into the data
center, enterprises can further simplify IT in their branch offices
with the RSP, which enables “virtualized edge services.” As
discussed above, Steelhead appliances enable organizations to pull
servers from the branch offices and instead rely on resources at
the data center. While this can eliminate much of the equipment in
a branch office (such as Microsoft Exchange Servers, file servers,
and web servers), branch offices often still need servers for basic
services such as printing and IP address management.
With the RSP, customers can deploy best-of-breed software from
other vendors on Steelhead appliances in a self-contained
partition, so that they can deliver branch office services without
separate servers. This means that organizations can run multiple
branch services on a single Steelhead, simplifying administration
and streamlining infrastructure. The RSP runs in a protected zone
and does not impact the resource allocations dedicated to maintain
peak
Steelhead appliance operations.
Fewer servers required to provide services at branch locations can
lead to significant savings, particularly for larger organizations.
For example, the list price of a server to supply IP address
management in a branch office is about $3200 for 75 – 200 users.
In addition, technology purchase costs can be
as little as 20% of the total cost of ownership, according to
industry analysts.6 So, the TCO of this server could be up to
$16,000. When added up over many branch offices, these figures are
significant: according to IDC, the average mid-size enterprise (100
– 999 employees) has 8.7 branches, and the average large business
(over 1000 employees) has 65.2 branches.7 This means that the total
cost to deploy and support servers across branches just for IP
address management can range from about $140 K for a mid-size
company to over $1 M for a larger company.
Instead, via the RSP, organizations can now deploy this
functionality on a Steelhead appliance already sitting in a branch,
and generate considerable savings. According to Justin Marthaler at
Strand Associates (a Riverbed customer), the RSP "will save us
$10,000 to $15,000 in equipment costs for new offices, and that
doesn't include the continued cost of maintaining additional
servers.”
Optimize Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery
(DR) is an area of growing importance for most organizations. The
majority of companies now have some type of DR site: according to a
recent survey by Forrester and the Disaster Recovery Journal, 57%
of companies have dedicated IT infrastructure for disaster recovery
purposes.8
Enterprises can use Riverbed solutions to optimize their DR
investments in several ways. First, they can reduce the cost of DR
operations. Because
Steelhead products effectively add bandwidth capacity to the
network, enterprises can spend less on bandwidth going to the DR
site. In addition, with vastly improved data transfer speeds, many
organizations can eliminate tape back up in remote offices and
instead back up their data over the WAN.
For example, one of the world’s largest banks with more than
200,000 employees used Riverbed solutions to eliminate tape backup
completely in 2500 branch offices. The network architect at the
bank observed: “With Steelhead appliances, our WAN connections
see the equivalent of a 146x capacity increase, which enables us to
eliminate tape backup in branch offices.” A streamlined DR
infrastructure can also drive significant productivity improvements
in the IT department, as the IT staff no longer needs to manage
tapes that are distributed throughout branch offices.
Riverbed products also enable more frequent and reliable backup and
replication. For many organizations, it takes hours to complete a
full backup and replication cycle. Not only does this consume
network resources, but it also exposes an organization to
significant risk. If there is a failure in the data center before a
full backup is completed, an enterprise can lose a significant
amount of data, which could lead to lost revenue and problems
complying with regulations.
For example, LITTLE Diversified Architectural Consulting, an
architectural consulting firm with 300 employees, is using Riverbed
solutions to improve its backup process. Chris France, the CIO at
LITTLE observed: “A single day’s worth of lost data can cost us
$200,000. So, as you can imagine, data backup is critical for
us.” With Riverbed Steelhead appliances, LITTLE was able to
reduce its backup windows from four hours to just five minutes.
Using Riverbed solutions enabled a more secure and reliable remote
backup process that removed the risk of losing vital client
data.
Riverbed solutions can also optimize disaster recovery by enabling
dual-use DR. Investments in DR are still relatively small for most
organizations. According to the Forrester/Disaster Recovery Journal
survey, 45% of respondents spend less than $500K per year on
disaster recovery. This is true particularly for smaller
organizations, which are less likely to invest significantly in
disaster recovery. The net result is that the DR site for most
organizations is vastly underpowered, and therefore not used on a
regular basis.
With the Riverbed solutions, the performance of a DR site can be
improved significantly by increasing the WAN capacity to the site.
With this improved performance, organizations can use the DR site
for other purposes, such as sharing a data center’s workload in
peak hours, and turn a previously idle asset into a productive use
of resources. Particularly for larger organizations that have made
significant investments, dual use DR is a way to leverage an
existing asset and offset costs. For smaller organizations that are
reluctant to invest heavily in DR, dual use DR is a way to improve
disaster preparedness in a cost-effective manner.
Finally, in the event of a disaster, Riverbed solutions would
considerably improve the performance of a DR site. The Riverbed
solutions reduce bandwidth consumption by 65% to 95% and accelerate
application performance from five to 50x, even up to 100x in some
cases. For many companies, slowdowns of even a few minutes can have
a substantial impact on revenues. With Riverbed products at the DR
site, organizations can ensure sufficient performance when they
need it most.
Conclusion
Riverbed solutions are a smart
investment for any organization, even in tough economic times,
because they drive significant cost savings that often pay for the
investment in a matter of months. In addition, customers achieve
dramatic productivity improvements, enabling them to work in ways
that were not previously possible. Files that used to take hours to
access now take seconds, and workers around the globe can
collaborate as if they were in the same office. With thousands of
customers across every industry, Riverbed is the clear leader in
the WAN optimization marketplace, helping customers cut costs today
and prepare for growth in the future.
