Expand Networks, (www.expand.com) the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, today announced Finnair, the Finnish national airline, has signed a contract to implement Expand Networks WAN optimisation technology as part of its company-wide server consolidation project.
In partnership with ICT solutions provider, Access Solutions, Expand Networks' Accelerators will be deployed across 40 branch offices, enabling Finnair to completely remove local servers while placing all employees in virtual proximity of their applications and data centre services.
As the natural hub for air travel between Europe and Asia, Finnair's 9 000 employees are located across the two continents. Dependent on the WAN for delivery of business-critical applications, the airline's employees were experiencing poor application performance, which subsequently impacted business productivity. In particular, large e-mail files and bandwidth intensive data warehouse applications became subject to latency, packet loss and congestion.
Kari Hanninen, head of infrastructure at Finnair, explained: “We previously overcame the latency and congestion issues simply by buying more bandwidth. This was not only economically unviable, but it didn't solve the problem. In our Far East branch, offices users were facing significant delays even with a 2Mg link. Rather than throwing unmanaged bandwidth at the problem, we turned to our local ICT access solutions partner to recommend a solution.”
Having explored competitive WAN optimisation technologies in the past, Hanninen found that the products were too network-centric and lacked the capability to deliver local services for the removal of branch office servers. He explains: “As part of our wider consolidation strategy, we wanted to remove our branch office servers completely, however, we didn't want to lose local functionality such as print and file share services. We have waited to ensure we implement a proven technology solution that can both optimise traffic for our dispersed user-base and provide the file services that we need for our branch office users. It quickly became clear Expand delivered the most complete offering.”
Access Solutions worked closely with Finnair to assess products from Juniper, BlueCoat and Expand Networks, choosing to pilot Expand Networks' technology at its branch office sites in Oslo. During the pilot, the Expand Networks' Accelerator immediately compressed and accelerated traffic across the WAN.
“The time it took us to experience the benefits to the network was incredibly quick,” commented Hanninen. “To assess the true value of the technology, we took the Expand Accelerator of the network without telling the users. They immediately noticed the difference in network performance. Having trialled the integrated print and local file share capabilities of the Accelerator, we were confident we could move forward with the wider server consolidation project whilst ensuring a consistent user experience for the branch offices.”
Expand Networks' Accelerator uniquely combines print, DNS, DHCP and full-featured point-to-point VPN service to enable complete server consolidation at the branch office. Should the WAN experience any downtime, Expand's WAN-Out capability will provide those remote users with uninterrupted access to the files they were working on to guarantee continued productivity.
With support from distribution partner, CDG, Access Solutions will complete the roll-out of Expand Accelerator's across Finnair's global offices by the end of 2009. The deployment will form part of a wider infrastructure refresh at the airline. Finnair is currently exploring the possibility of a WAN optimisation managed service with its current ICT partners.
Mike Betz, VP Sales EMEA at Expand Networks, comments: “Company-wide server consolidation strategies are paved with the best intentions, however, many organisations forget to consider the remaining need for server-based functions at the branch office. This requires additional file server hardware to be deployed in each branch office, which usually goes against the reason they chose to consolidate in the first place. Finnair is a great example of how our technology can replace the need for additional file servers and enable complete server consolidation across the entire organisation. By creating a virtual proximity experience, Finnair now has a consistent end-user environment across its branch offices, regardless of the distance between the user and their applications.”
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