Kendle Selects Riverbed WAN Optimization

Riverbed Technology announced that Kendle International, Inc. has selected and deployed Riverbed WAN optimization solutions. Kendle deployed the Riverbed Steelhead appliances to speed performance of its centralized applications. As a result, Kendle has dramatically reduced its bandwidth utilization and increased employee productivity while reducing its overall IT infrastructure costs.

Kendle is a leading global clinical research organization providing the full range of early- to late-stage clinical development services for the world’s biopharmaceutical industry. The organization was founded in 1981. To support its growing employee base in dispersed locations worldwide, Kendle has a multi-tiered IT infrastructure that consists of six regional data centers that maintain a large amount of equipment and various infrastructure components, from application servers to mail systems and databases. Several of these locations have a massive amount of clinical data that is regularly accessed by employees in Kendle’s global locations.

Access to centralized applications, including SharePoint, PeopleSoft, Oracle, SQL, Lotus Notes, and a variety of internal applications, is critical to the success of Kendle’s business. Therefore, Kendle’s IT team is constantly searching for solutions to improve remote access and improve overall system efficiency.

As part of its continuous improvement program, Kendle installed network compression appliances at its six primary data centers, deployed Citrix to WAN-enable the heavier core applications, and upgraded its network bandwidth. Although this provided marked performance improvement, the company decided to reevaluate its entire WAN optimization environment by engaging Gartner for market analysis and then moved forward with a vendor evaluation process.

"Our number one goal was to find a new WAN optimization solution that would positively impact our end-users’ experience when accessing our centralized applications. Riverbed came out on top in all of the tests we conducted in our real-world environment," said James Miller, Director of Global Networking and Telecommunications at Kendle. "During the free trial of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances we received unsolicited positive responses from remote office end-users and IT staff. Once the evaluation was complete and the devices removed, we had end-users and IT knocking on our doors asking what had happened. This was the big seller for us. A positive end-user experience is critical."

Kendle deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its six primary data center locations. Within a 30-day timeframe, Kendle removed 1.2 terabytes of data from the WAN and experienced a more than three-fold capacity improvement in terms of the bandwidth utilization. With Riverbed installed, Kendle is experiencing reduced utilization of WAN bandwidth, including a 70% reduction in Lotus Notes traffic, approximately 78% reduction in TCP CIFS traffic, and an 83% reduction in HTTP traffic. The reduction of data traversing the WAN has eliminated the need for Kendle to invest in additional bandwidth upgrades at the majority of its sites.

At several remote locations, Kendle has deployed VMware ESX servers that host user and company data, as well as provide infrastructure services. "This solution works well, but there is still an investment in the server infrastructure and backup infrastructure at these remote locations. Additionally, traditional backups require that an administrator change tapes and check the backups each day, which can be rather time consuming," said Nathan Thompson, Corporate Nework Manager at Kendle. In these locations Kendle is leveraging its Steelhead appliance deployment by running the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) as a replacement to its traditional ESX deployments. "Making use of the RSP platform and Steelhead appliance performance gains allows us to consolidate data back into the datacenters. We are able to provide basic infrastructure services such as DNS, DHCP, WINS and WDS from within the RSP platform. By moving all data back to the data center, the need for backup infrastructure in our remote sites has been eliminated," said Thompson.

"Selecting Riverbed as our WAN optimization vendor has provided us with scenarios for our IT infrastructure that we haven’t previously been able to take advantage of," Thompson continued. "The application acceleration and data deduplication was critical, but the added benefit of further consolidating infrastructure at our remote locations provides us with great cost savings and productivity gains."

When Kendle selected Riverbed as its WAN optimization provider, the IT team liked the synergies that Riverbed solutions had with VMware technology. Though Kendle has already virtualized more than 60% of its global infrastructure using VMware, the organization is looking to further reduce its IT footprint at remote offices through the use of VMware on Riverbed’s RSP platform.