SEA

Systems Engineering and Assessment is an independent systems house that specialises in real-time control and safety-related solutions. Formed in 1988, SEA offers complete solutions, taking forward the results of concept and feasibility studies to generate civil, military and space standard hardware and software products. The company employs 200 people across 2 sites in the UK and has an annual turnover of £16M.

SEA's two sites are separated by a 2Mbps megastream WAN link provided by BT. One site, which is also the company’s headquarters, is located in a village south of Bath housing approximately 120 employees. Its other site is located in Bristol and hosts an additional 70 people. Data is hosted on each site using NetWare 5/6 file servers and email is hosted using Exchange servers located on each site. Additional development tools are provisioned through a variety of client server applications based on Windows platforms.

In the early part of 2006, SEA realised that they had an issue with the WAN link between their 2 sites, which was impacting response times for users. The company needed a solution that would maximise the utilisation of available bandwidth on the inter-site link and provide LAN like user response times.

SEA investigated the costs of provisioning additional bandwidth between its sites and identified three key problems.

Firstly, due to the rural headquarters location, simply doubling the bandwidth would cost an initial £25,000 with an additional £10,000 per annum lease cost.

Secondly it was clear that use of broadband-based networks using VPN would be prohibitively expensive due to security restrictions that are imposed by customers.

Finally, they calculated that from a utilisation perspective, it would be necessary to increase bandwidth by approximately 8x for any tangible benefit to be seen by staff. It was also apparent that increasing bandwidth would only be a short-term resolution – increasing the bandwidth would inevitably result in increased demands on the inter-site link’s usage meaning further upgrades would be required.

With this in mind, it was clear that SEA needed a solution that would firstly be transparent to the user and secondly be quick to implement. From a benefit perspective, the solution needed to achieve at least the same results as doubling the bandwidth. The solution would also need to act intelligently, filtering out unnecessary data and removing duplicated content that travelled between sites on a daily basis.

IT Team Leader Toby Blackburn researched the market and became interested in the solution from Riverbed.

Riverbed’s award-winning Steelhead appliances accelerate enterprise applications typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices. The Steelhead appliance’s intelligent optimisations give companies that share data and collaborate between distributed offices significant performance improvements for a broad range of applications that are important to their businesses, offering these companies the ability to simplify IT infrastructure and realise significant capital and operational cost savings.

Riverbed introduced Toby to its leading UK reseller Teneo, who discussed the solution in technical depth and installed and configured a trial of the technology.

When SEA started its trial of the Riverbed units, the objective was simple. They needed the solution to demonstrate approximately 2x performance increase on the inter-site link. This would mean that from a value perspective, the Riverbed solution offered more than a simple bandwidth improvement.

This performance improvement needed to be based upon what the user would see in tangible benefits.

SEA drafted a test specification that aimed to test how the solution performed in 4 keys areas:

• File Access
• Email Operations
• SQL Access
• Web Access

Following installation of the Riverbed units, tests indicated average performance improvements of 17x, 6x, 1x and 2x respectively. SEA also tested to see how the current project to move existing NetWare servers to Windows would be affected. For these tests, the performance increases rose to around 45x.

In the tests, un-optimised data took 4 minutes to save a data file. Under the optimised session with Riverbed, saving a file to the NetWare server, this dropped to 2 minutes. On the Windows platform, it dropped to 3 seconds.

Based on these results, the investment of £20,000 against the upgrade costs made the purchase decision easy. After the successful trial, SEA purchased the units from Teneo, along with a 12 month support and maintenance contract. Toby comments:

“Teneo were the only company who could offer us two things that we needed from our solution. Firstly, they knew the product and its capabilities – they were able to discuss our requirements, understand them and tell us how the product would benefit us. Secondly, they were able to offer us the opportunity to try the units in our environment to prove they would work as we wanted.”

Piers Carey, CEO of Teneo is pleased to have added SEA to its customer list.

“We now have over 30 Riverbed customers, ranging from 2 site UK organisations to multisite global companies. SEA has proved to us once again that the Riverbed solution delivers dramatic results, has a strong ROI and is a robust and straightforward solution. We have Riverbed customers in most of the major business sectors now and are finding that engineering and architecural companies derive particularly good results, due to the large files they transfer across their network”.