Riverbed Technology, de IT-infrastructure performance company voor netwerken, applicaties en storage, rolt Riverbed Steelheads uit in twee datacenters en in alle veertien branchekantoren van ABD Insurance & Financial Services (ABDI). ABDI behaalde de return on investment (ROI) binnen tien maanden. Daarnaast verminderde het bandbreedtegebruik, werden disaster recovery (DR-)-processen verbeterd en kregen ruim 800 medewerkers sneller toegang tot e-mail.
ABDI biedt dienstverlening aan op het gebied van verzekeringsbemiddeling, risicomanagement en oplossingen voor werknemersverzekeringen in Amerika. Het bedrijf werd in 1990 opgericht en is uitgegroeid tot de veertiende verzekeringsbemiddelaar van Amerika, voorafgaand aan de overname door Wells Fargo in 2007.
Als financiële dienstverlener is het voor ABDI essentieel om klantgegevens centraal en veilig op te slaan. Daarnaast is het ook van belang dat gegevens snel beschikbaar zijn voor medewerkers op remote locaties. Echter, de afstand tussen de gecentraliseerde gegevens en branchekantoren resulteerde in trage responsetijden bij het verkrijgen van toegang tot klantgegevens. De communicatie met collega’s op remote locaties via e-mail verliep traag. Daarnaast was het niet mogelijk om binnen 24 uur een back-up te maken van de enorme hoeveelheid data die wordt gedistribueerd tussen de verschillende kantoren op één dag. Dit vormde een groot obstakel voor ABDI’s disaster recovery, omdat de data-replicatietijden meer dan zeven dagen in beslag namen.
“We zochten een oplossing die onze DR zou verbeteren en tegelijkertijd onze productiviteit”, zegt Jerome Keller, data center manager bij ABDI. “Onze regionale kantoren hadden grote netwerk-upgrades nodig, waaronder ook de verdubbeling van de T1-lijnen en een nieuwe DS3. Echter, we waren er van overtuigd dat alleen het uitbreiden van de bandbreedte de vertragingen niet zou verhelpen.”
Het bedrijf besloot te kijken naar WAN-optimalisatie en evalueerde oplossingen van Cisco, Blue Coat en Riverbed. Er werd gekozen voor Riverbed vanwege de eenvoudige uitrol, performance en het beheer. Als gevolg van het gebruik van de Steelheads, stroomlijnde ABDI de back-up- en replicatieprocessen. De back-uptijden verlaagden met 85% en het bandbreedtegebruik is gereduceerd met 70%.
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INSURANCE FIRM DEPLOYS RIVERBED TO IMPROVE DISASTER RECOVERY AND ACHIEVE LAN-LIKE SPEEDS FOR BRANCH OFFICES
ABD Insurance Optimizes Disaster Recovery and Improves Application Performance
Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today announced that ABD Insurance & Financial Services (ABDI) has deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances in its two data centers and at each of its 14 branch offices. ABDI obtained a return on investment in 10 months while reducing bandwidth usage, improving disaster recovery processes, and accelerating access to email for more than 800 employees.
ABDI provides insurance brokerage, risk management, and employee benefits consulting solutions and services in the United States. Formed in 1990, the company grew to the 14th largest insurance brokerage in the nation prior to its acquisition by Wells Fargo in 2007. As a financial services company, it is critical for ABDI to keep customer data centralized and secure, while also ensuring that the data is quickly accessible by employees in remote offices. However, the distance between its centralized data and branch offices led employees to experience slow response times when accessing customer data and communicating with team members in dispersed offices via email. In addition, the large amount of data that was distributed to and from dispersed offices in a day could not be backed up within 24 hours. This presented a major obstacle for ABDI’s disaster recovery (DR) efforts, as data replication times were exceeding seven days.
“We needed a solution that would not only improve our disaster recovery efforts but also improve our productivity,” said Jerome Keller, data center manager at ABDI. “Our regional offices were requesting major network upgrades, which included doubling the number of T1 lines and adding a new DS3. However, we knew that adding more bandwidth wouldn’t take care of latency issues.”
The company decided to look into WAN optimization. After an independent lab evaluation of WAN optimization alternatives from Cisco, Blue Coat and Riverbed, the company selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances due to their simplicity of deployment, ease-of-management and performance. As a result of its Steelhead appliance deployment, ABDI accelerated and streamlined its backup and replication processes, reducing its backup times by 85 percent and achieving a 70 percent reduction in bandwidth utilization. ABDI exceeded the company’s stringent end-to-end throughput requirements with Steelhead appliances, achieving Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of four hours and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of two hours that was required to protect the company’s assets and improve its business continuity processes.
“Selecting WAN optimization was an easy choice, but Riverbed really made the difference,” said Keller. “By reducing our backup time to 24 hours, Riverbed helped ensure our data was secure. Previously, when data took up to a week to back up, all of our client information was at risk. In the event of a disaster, our company would have had to resort to backup tapes and NetApp replication.”
The Steelhead deployment has also enabled ABDI branch office employees to quickly access data and critical business applications, such as email, Microsoft SQL, SAP BusinessObjects and Vertafore-Sagitta.
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This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed’s products and services, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions and customer payback following implementation of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on July 30, 2009. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.
Over Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is de IT-infrastructure performance company. De groep Wide Area Network (WAN) optimalisatie-oplossingen van Riverbed verlost organisaties van algemene IT-restricties door het verhogen van de applicatieperformance, maakt consolidatie mogelijk en biedt een organisatiebreed netwerk en inzicht in de applicaties. Dit alles zonder uitbreiding van de bandwijdte, opslag en servers. Duizenden bedrijven met gedistribueerde omgevingen gebruiken Riverbed om hun IT-infrastructuur te versnellen, minder kostbaar en meer reactief. Meer informatie over Riverbed (NASDAQ:RVBD) is te vinden op
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