Teneo enables 600% network performance increase at Henry Schein
Published on: 13 January 2009
Teneo, a leading application performance management solutions provider, deployed a Riverbed’s Steelhead solution that produced the performance gains needed to enable effective IT consolidation.
Henry Schein provides a comprehensive selection of branded and own label healthcare products to more than 400,000 customers in over 120 countries.
Henry Schein UK Holdings is the largest distributor of healthcare products and services to office-based practitioners in the combined European and North American markets. For many years it has been synonymous with the supply of quality dental products, providing the UK dentist with the total solution to all their practice needs.
The company has 900 employees supported by a Wide Area Network (WAN), serving a total of 10 sites. With the healthcare sector evolving rapidly, Henry Schein needed to provide IT solutions that maximise productivity while reducing costs in order to stay ahead of its competition.
Poor application performance was reducing efficiency and leaving employees frustrated. Large files, especially, Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawings of healthcare products and equipment, were taking several minutes to transfer. To resolve this they needed to increase application performance so that information could be shared faster.
Henry Schein was embarking on an IT consolidation project in order to lower costs, streamline assets and processes, reduce complexity and enhance business agility.
Optimised application performance is a key component of consolidation because users are required to perform many more transactions over the WAN than before. In a consolidated environment, data requests such as those for files or emails that were previously served by local infrastructure must now take place over the WAN. Without optimising application performance, these requests could result in congested networks, even slower application performance, and frustrated users.
Chris Rose, IT Manager at Henry Schein explains: “Slow application performance was exacerbated when we started centralising data to our Gillingham office, causing large files to take up to 10 minutes to transfer. We realised that increasing bandwidth alone would not solve the latency problem long term.”Henry Schein was already using Allot’s NetEnforcer provided by Teneo, and having been impressed by the company’s service and expertise, the IT management team returned to them for advice.
Teneo advised that compression and caching would not address the underlying issue and recommended deploying Riverbed Technology’s Steelhead solution because of its all encompassing approach and unparalleled ability to give LAN-like performance across the WAN without the need for costly bandwidth upgrades.
Rose gave the green light for a pilot in August 2007 in which Teneo installed Riverhead Steelhead appliances at both Henry Schein’s central data centre in Gillingham and its Bradford office where the majority of complaints were arising. Within 30 minutes the two evaluation devices were up and running, delivering immediate performance gains in traffic between these two key sites.
Rose commented: “We did extensive testing in a live environment. Riverbed’s Steelheads dramatically improved performance and we found there was an average reduction in transfer time of 600%, which was particularly noticeable with large CAD files. The decision whether to go ahead and purchase was a no brainer!”
Henry Schein went on to purchase six Riverbed Steelhead appliances of varying sizes. The ‘plug in and play’ ease of installation meant that its internal team were able to deploy the solution themselves without the need to change any routers, switches or servers.
Rose concludes: “We have avoided significant capital expenditure and additional investments in IT staff. Deploying Riverbed’s Steelhead was fundamental to our data centralisation project. As a result we now have less complaints from users, more efficient IT and happy, more productive staff.”
James Hall, Marketing Director, Teneo, commented: “Riverbed’s Steelhead solution has gained Henry Schein significant speed and productivity advantage, while enabling them to centralise their data repository. Our bandwidth optimisation products have increased WAN speed by 600%, and they can now transfer files within seconds rather than minutes.
“All of these gains have been made at a significantly lower cost than if they had invested in additional bandwidth.”
