Vinci Deployed 30 Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced that VINCI PLC, a subsidiary of VINCI, a concessions and construction group, has deployed 30 Riverbed Steelhead appliances across the UK as part of an effort to re-architect and consolidate its IT infrastructure while reducing costs and ensuring that critical data is recoverable quickly should disaster strike. Following installation of the Steelhead appliances, data recovery time dropped from 72 to less than 24 hours, and the company has experienced an eight-fold increase in bandwidth capacity. In addition, VINCI PLC has reduced the number of servers at remote sites by 80%.

"Thanks to Riverbed we’ve been able to make more applications and data available over the WAN and use IT assets with less concern about the impact to the network topology," said Ben Paddick, VINCI PLC’s Technical Design Architect. "Riverbed has been as much of an enabler to VINCI PLC as Windows XP."

In the last year, VINCI PLC planned several significant IT initiatives, including installation of Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) to improve its backup and recovery system and consolidation of its IT infrastructure to reduce costs and control data and server sprawl. Both of these projects required faster data transfers and application response times over the wide area network (WAN).

Paddick explains: "We had to introduce a number of new projects all at the same time, but didn’t want the expense of upgrading our current bandwidth throughput when the results would be questionable. We considered a thin client alternative, but this would have required major changes to our infrastructure. We then investigated wide area data services solutions."

VINCI PLC ran a six week trial testing products from WAN optimization vendors including Cisco and Riverbed. VINCI PLC chose Riverbed for its ease-of-deployment, manageability and speed at which applications were accelerated over the WAN.

The 30 Steelhead appliances installed by VINCI PLC have enabled the company to successfully implement the new backup and data recovery project with TSM, and remove 25 file servers from branch offices and replace them with just three in the data center. Data recovery times have dropped from 72 hours to less than 24 hours and bandwidth capacity has increased eight-fold. Users no longer experience delays in accessing live data, and the improvement in application acceleration has led to the implementation of new projects. These included a storage area network (SAN) and SharePoint portal, which has improved employees’ access to the company’s intranet services.

VINCI PLC is now conducting a trial of Riverbed Steelhead Mobile software to accelerate applications for mobile users and enable home working. The 100 project sites are of particular interest as DSL is not always available, so 3G or satellite access is used instead. VINCI PLC is also considering the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) in order to run print servers, DNS, and IPAM functionality on the Steelhead appliances. This would enable VINCI PLC to consolidate IT infrastructure even further at its branch offices.