Expand Networks, the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, today announced that Drive Assist, the non-fault accident specialist, has deployed Expand Networks' WAN optimisation technology to accelerate the delivery of its and bring its distributed workforce in virtual proximity of applications and data centre services.
Expand's WAN optimisation technology has improved user productivity and business efficiency, while delivering low TCO and contributing to significant reduction in ICT expenditure.
Drive Assist specialises in providing replacement vehicles for innocent parties following roadside accidents. The business has grown dramatically in recent years and now boasts national coverage via 19 regional offices. With no remote servers in place, users at Drive Assist's remote offices were physically separated from the applications and services they required to do their jobs, relying on WAN links to access data from the head office site. With increasingly large amounts of data travelling over the WAN, latency and congestion challenges began to compromise business efficiency.
“Bandwidth capacity became an increasing concern,” explains Simon Wilson, network manager at Drive Assist. “As staff numbers increased, so did the WAN traffic, resulting in poor network performance. Initially, we undertook a company-wide bandwidth upgrade to overcome this. However, as the organisation continued to grow, specifically from an administration standpoint, it became clear this was not sufficient. We generated more and more documents and with that came more printing, causing the WAN links to become saturated very quickly - even after the upgrade.”
Drive Assist evaluated WAN optimisation technology from Expand Networks and Riverbed to address the problem and selected Expand Networks for its superior Wide Area File Services (WAFS) capability and favourable business case. “Proven business value is critical for any procurement we make and our financial director sought a guaranteed payback from the technology within one year,” comments Wilson. “While Riverbed's solution offered us payback for our investment over a four-year period, Expand could deliver a full ROI within 11 months - the choice was simple.”
Expand Networks' integrated WAN optimisation approach uses techniques such as byte-level caching and dynamic compression, delivering a superior end-user experience for Drive Assist, by ensuring fast and secure access to centrally located data across its increasingly distributed WAN. The compression capabilities of the platform quickly delivered the bandwidth increase required, while the acceleration techniques overcame any latency. In addition, according to Wilson, Expand's integrated WAFS functionality enabled employees at the branch offices to collaborate with shared data as though they were on the same LAN.
“Expand has given us a very stable network environment. The performance of our applications is significantly quicker, improving our remote users' productivity. Monitoring tells us that usage is now so low we are set to trade the 2Mg links that we upgraded in 2008 back down to 1Mg, which translates into yet another significant cost saving. With Expand, we are reaping the productivity benefits of WAN optimisation at the same time as reducing the TCO and increasing the ROI on our existing infrastructure.”
The WAN optimisation technology is also supporting all VOIP calls at Drive Assist. With all calls recorded for security reasons, VOIP traffic going back to the main site can suffer from packet loss, causing a jitter effect. Expand's layer 7 QOS (quality of service) ensures all VOIP traffic has the protected bandwidth it needs.
Adam Davison, VP Corporate Marketing and Sales, Expand Networks, comments: “As users and their applications move further apart, business performance suffers. Expand's technology delivers a virtual proximity experience designed to close this gap through the delivery of virtual bandwidth. Drive Assist is a great example of how our next-generation compression and caching techniques can take limited Wide Area Links and create four to 10 times the throughputs - on the exact same infrastructure. In today's economic conditions, sweating your assets in this way is critical, and as Drive Assist shows, our technology can increase business productivity while delivering extended returns on network investments by stretching limited resources further.”
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