Adcorp Holdings announced recently that it has selected and deployed Riverbed's Steelhead appliances within its wide area network infrastructure.
Rapid Technologies, a leading technology partner of Riverbed, was selected to design, supply, deploy and maintain the Riverbed Steelhead infrastructure on behalf of Adcorp Holdings.
Adcorp Holdings is listed in the Support Services sector on the JSE. The group provides professional business services in staffing and human capital management, and is represented by leading industry brands. Activities of the Adcorp Group include permanent recruitment, flexible staffing, education and training in the human capital marketplace.
Prior to installing Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, Adcorp relied solely on the ability of its MPLS network capability to manage and facilitate the prioritisation of network traffic. While this has been very effective, and Adcorp's Networking partner very responsive in addressing the growing network bandwidth needs, Adcorp was reaching a point where bandwidth cost and the reciprocal benefit from the additional bandwidth were beginning to diverge, resulting in an ever-increasing cost versus reducing benefit impact to the Adcorp business.
As in most businesses, Adcorp's primary source of traffic is electronic mail, which has been growing exponentially year on year, and a recent merger of additional business units onto the Adcorp MPLS brought about additional traffic in the form of Microsoft SQL.
When presented with the Riverbed solution, and the offer to run a proof of concept (POC) through Rapid Technologies, Adcorp took the opportunity to see what the technology could do, albeit with scepticism, as prior experience in this field had proven to be less than satisfactory.
The net result, gleaned over two weeks of intensive testing, indicated a significant consolidation of the mail and SQL traffic, where a reduction of overall traffic delivered improvement of the bandwidth. An important point to note is that the effect the Steelhead equipment had on the WAN segments was demonstrated NOT only via the Steelhead management reporting capability, but also through Adcorp's MPLS Management reporting system. Adcorp IT Management used this information to determine the viability of the technology, not what the Steelhead Management System displayed.
Apart from the above results, the POC also delivered tangible, achievable benefits from latency, quality and cost saving and cost containment perspectives. These results led Adcorp to take the decision to invest in the Riverbed technology. Matthew Campbell, Adcorp Accountability - Group IT Manager.
Rapid Technologies' part of the Richmark Group of companies provides dedicated and professional approach to optimisation and rationalisation of the way companies do business. Rapid Technologies is Riverbed's premier partner for Africa.
Gary Coetzee, managing director, described what Rapid was able to deliver for Adcorp: "When we initially engaged with Adcorp there were some specific challenges; we then worked with the Riverbed technology to address all the business issues. Riverbed now allows for replication and transfer of large database files over wide area networks, thereby delivering optimisation across their network."
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