Brazilian Grupo Paranapanema Deals With Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced Grupo Paranapanema has implemented Riverbed Steelhead appliances in its five industrial plants.

As a result of its deployment, Grupo Paranapanema has improved the performance of its mission-critical applications by 5X and reduced its backup windows by 10X. With the performance provided by Riverbed, the Group was able to centralize its IT infrastructure without sacrificing remote employee productivity and user satisfaction, as well as improve its overall disaster recovery processes. In addition, the Group avoided expensive bandwidth upgrades of over $200,000 per year.

Grupo Paranapanema – comprised of Caraíba Metais, Eluma, and Cibrafértil, producers of refined copper; copper semi-manufactured products and their alloys; and single superphosphate and fertilizers – has five industrial plants in the States of São Paulo, Bahia, and Espírito Santo.

In order to support the implementation of an ERP system, the Group embarked on a centralization project that moved its business-critical data to its data center located in São Paulo. After this consolidation of data, employees experienced long e-mail and file sharing delays. The Group’s IT department considered updating its links in the remote sites with the hope of improving performance.

"The cost of more bandwidth would be too high, considering the current design of our WAN MPLS, with two links in each site for backup and load balancing," said Roberto Orrico, infrastructure coordinator of the Group. "And additional bandwidth wouldn’t solve the latency problems that were core to the performance issues." Since adding additional bandwidth was cost-prohibitive, the Group investigated alternative solutions."

Ímpar Soluções em TI, an integrator partner of Grupo Paranapanema and an expert in information security and IT infrastructure, presented Riverbed WAN optimization technology to the Group. "We saw that Riverbed was ranked as a leader in the market by leading industry analysts, which led us to test the Steelhead appliances," affirms Orrico. After a successful free trial, supported by the distributor Allier, the Group decided to implement the solution in its five industrial plants.

As a result of the Riverbed deployment accomplished by Ímpar Soluções em TI, applications over the WAN performed up to five times faster. The plant Eluma – Capuava achieved a WAN traffic reduction of 90%, and the overall reduction in the Group’s five sites using Riverbed was 80%. In addition, the Group experienced significant improvements in the email system (Lotus Notes) and in the user remote file sharing through its São Paulo data center, as worksheets and documents could now be accessed by remote employees as if they were working locally. Also, the centralized backup time with Windows NT Backup tool, which formerly took 48 hours, was dramatically reduced – by about 90%, to an average of five hours, due to Riverbed WAN optimization.

Orrico says that Grupo Paranapanema experienced additional indirect benefits as a result of its Riverbed WAN optimization deployment, including a reduction in bandwidth utilization. That bandwidth is now available for other network services, including videoconference, remote surveillance, and the VoIP service that connects all the private branch exchange systems of the Group.