Teneo helps Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service reduce bandwidth costs and improve application performance
Published on: 01 October 2008
Teneo, a leading infrastructure optimisation specialist, has installed a solution totalling 33 Riverbed Steelhead appliances for Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service to help reduce their bandwidth costs and improve application performance.
Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service (DFRS) serves a population of nearly one million across Derbyshire. DFRS has 35 sites across the county, with its headquarters in Littleover, south west of Derby. The service has 950 employees.
DFRS was looking to centralise its network as users began to get frustrated with slow application performance and network speed. The network architecture consisted of a 34Mbit virtual private network (VPN) to the main headquarters and a mixture of 2Mbit leased lines or ADSLs depending whether the fire station was a full-time or part time station.
Applications used on the network included a corporate intranet, fire safety applications plus Microsoft Office. As part of the centralisation project, Microsoft SharePoint 2007 was deployed. This allows users from remote office locations to share documents and information in a collaborative environment. DFRS considered increasing bandwidth, but costs were prohibitive – an 8Mbit VPN link would have cost £24,000 to install and another £19,800 to lease annually. It was also felt that increasing bandwidth would not solve the problem of network latency.
Pete Garyga, ICT projects officer at DFRS then began considering alternative solutions such as Cisco Velocity and Riverbed Steelhead. After discussions with Teneo, a trial installation using five Riverbed Steelhead appliances across five sites went ahead. During a two week trial, DFRS experienced a four-fold bandwidth increase and agreed to roll out Riverbed Steelhead across all sites.
After the roll-out, bandwidth increased three fold across the network with a total data reduction of 65%. The solution has also optimised Microsoft SharePoint to deliver performance similar to a local area network (LAN) for all users across the network. File transfer speeds have radically improved: a 50MB video file that used to take four minutes to copy now takes less than two seconds.
Pete Garyga, ICT projects officer, DFRS, commented:
“This Riverbed solution from Teneo has delivered fantastic results. It has increased the speed of our network and reduced latency, which has resulted in capacity savings and reduced the need for costly bandwidth upgrades. Teneo is extremely helpful and I recommend them highly. This whole solution was an easy decision for us.”
James Hall, marketing director, Teneo, commented:
“Many end-users such as DFRS are implementing collaborative work applications such as Microsoft SharePoint which results in large data files being transported around the network. Our solution was ideal for DFRS - Riverbed’s Optimisation System (RiOS) uses Application Streaming for HTTP - SharePoint’s underlying protocol. This resulted in dramatic application performance improvements using SharePoint in addition to increased network speed and reduced latency which Riverbed is renowned for.”
