Riverbed SteelFusion for Canadian Gold Mining Alamos

Riverbed Technology, Inc., in application performance infrastructure, announced that Alamos Gold Inc., a Canadian-based gold producer, is using its SteelFusion to eliminate the headaches of its branch office IT infrastructure, resulting in a more cost-effective and performance-driven IT architecture that supports its business.

Alamos Gold turned to SteelFusion to converge disparate server, storage, and network infrastructure into a single branch appliance that also centralizes all of the company’s remote branch data in its Toronto data center. This decreased infrastructure costs, while still providing local performance at remote locations, improving data protection, and enabling nearly instant recovery from any branch disasters. These efforts have given the company a technological advantage in an industry historically constrained by distance and location.

Founded in 1994, Alamos Gold is a Canadian-based gold producer that owns and operates gold mines in Mexico, and has exploration and development activities in both Mexico and Turkey. Its global operations generate huge volumes of data that need to be accessed locally as well as transferred to the company’s HQs in Toronto. Geologists, for example, create a terabyte of mapping data each year. Dealing with low bandwidth and high latency WANs in far-off regions required Alamos to leave local infrastructure at each site to keep applications and data accessible. These infrastructure challenges led to Alamos employees sending data files on DVD through the postal service, a process that often took three to four days, preventing real-time collaboration between the mines and HQs, risking data loss or corruption, and limiting the effectiveness of the company’s DR strategy.

“We considered centralizing all of the servers in Toronto, but in view of needing to keep applications and data local, WAN optimization alone was not the best solution,” said Rohit Tellis, director of IT, Alamos.

Yet maintaining dedicated infrastructure at each site also prohibited Alamos from supporting distant locations due to a lack of local IT expertise, difficulty in transporting servers to the sites, and the need for data generated at the mines to be backed up and stored. After presenting these challenges to multiple vendors, Alamos found that Riverbed was able to provide a viable solution to meet its needs.

By implementing the SteelFusion solution, Alamos was able to avoid the costs of deploying actual servers, storage and backup infrastructure at each mining site.

“With SteelFusion, we are able to serve up the data at the local site, have it cached in the event of an outage, and still streamed back to the data center in near real-time,” Tellis noted.

The availability of real-time data improved the ability of geologists to collaborate with their colleagues in the field.

“Some applications were previously unusable by our employees, but once we implemented the Riverbed solution, they had local access to the application and its data,” Tellis said.

Sending data via the postal service also resulted in a lag time of several days between data in the field and the versions stored in the Toronto data center, limiting the effectiveness of the company’s DR strategy. With the SteelFusion deployment, backing up and storing current mine data in Toronto improves data protection and ensures a solid DR plan. Information now arrives in Toronto within minutes instead of days. This process decreased Alamos’ RPO form three days down to a few minutes.

“With SteelFusion, we have realized a concrete DR plan for our distant sites,” Tellis added.

With the Riverbed deployment, Alamos saw ROI within six months, as Tellis was able to eliminate branch IT infrastructure and operations costs.

“Factoring in savings, such as the cost to buy and support server, storage, and data protection infrastructure at each site, this approach has yielded significant benefits. Riverbed SteelFusion gives us a more cost-effective and scalable solution to deploy IT infrastructure in any location we explore without sacrificing the productivity, security or IT management needs of a successful mining project. The Riverbed solution gives Alamos a competitive edge in the mining industry and an IT template for continued success,” concluded Tellis.

SteelFusion and Riverbed Application Performance Platform
SteelFusion is a branch converged infrastructure solution that centralizes data in the data center and delivers local performance with instant recovery at the branch. It consolidates branch servers, storage, networking, and virtualization infrastructure into a single solution. It expedites branch office provisioning, backup, and recovery and ensures continuous operations when disasters occur from any cause – weather, fire, or accident. With SteelFusion, businesses can restore branch operations in a matter of minutes vs. days, centrally protect and secure data in the data center, and lower the TCO of branch and remote offices.

SteelFusion is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform.