Riverbed WAN appliance doubles as VMware platform, produces big savings

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 14 September 2010 16:07

Business IT - Networking

Construction and infrastructure firm, Laing O'Rourke Australia, is using Riverbed Steelhead appliances deployed originally for wide area network optimisation to host virtualised services and applications at branch offices saving a, claimed, average of $30k per site per year.

Laing O'Rourke originally deployed the Steelhead appliances to accelerate data traffic between remote sites and corporate data centres and reduce the bandwidth utilisation and associated cost of the WAN links to each site.

According to Riverbed, "Once the Steelhead appliance deployment was complete, the company decided to take advantage of the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualised partition that allows customers to run up to five additional services and applications on VMware in a protected partition on the Steelhead appliance'¦

"Laing O'Rourke is now able to eliminate the cost and risk of running physical IT servers in remote construction sites. The company expects the Branch Office Box solution to completely replace physical servers and storage infrastructure at all of its remote sites in the next two years."

Laing O'Rourke's operations manager for information systems, Colin Bagley, said: "Laing O'Rourke Australia is a remote area specialist -- which often requires us to rapidly set up regional operations or offices to service major infrastructure or construction projects.

"We're currently using the RSP to run virtual print servers and office applications, saving our company approximately $30,000 per remote site, and we expect to see substantial additional savings as we continue the rollout to other projects."

Bagley added that further cost reductions are likely as the company deploys IP telephony at its remote sites, made possible by the reduction in WAN traffic enabled by the Steelhead appliances.

"While it's too early to calculate our total return on investment yet for this technology, our RoI should accelerate significantly once the virtual server technology is migrated to our larger project sites as well'¦We haven't yet had enough time to test the RSP at our larger sites, but it's fair to say that I can't see any of our remote sites using traditional - that is physical - server technology in the next two years."