Rapid Technologies announced today that HRG World Travel, one of South Africa's leading travel management companies, has selected Rapid to supply and deploy Riverbed's Steelhead wide-area data services (WDS) appliances to improve the performance of its applications, including Microsoft SharePoint over the wide area network (WAN), and enable centralisation of its IT infrastructure.
"As a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Bidvest Group Limited, one of South Africa's leading and most admired companies listed on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange, we share the group's philosophy of transparency, accountability, integrity, excellence and innovation in everything we do," says Ingrid von Moltke, National Sales and Marketing Manager.
Pine Nel, HRG World Travel - IT Manager, explains: "Moving from a decentralised to a centralised environment, HRG World Travel was faced with the challenge of enhancing the speed and performance of its collaboration, communication and reporting systems; Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS), Outlook/Exchange and SQL Server Reporting Services(SSRS) while freeing up bandwidth for its mission-critical systems. Add to this the increasing convergence voice and data and the need for better managed bandwidth became abundantly clear."
"Deploying Riverbed Steelhead devices across the network removed the need for a costly bandwidth upgrade without the lead-times associated with such an upgrade," continued Pine Nel from HRG. "Reduction in WAN traffic for the targeted applications ranged from 80% (SSRS, WSS) to 50% (Exchange) while reduction on sundry applications such as Windows Server Update Services and CIFS; data replication ranged from 80% to 95%. The combination of these reductions has had the effect of tripling the bandwidth available to our critical systems."
"Unlike competing approaches that are built primarily on either a network-compression or storage (caching) philosophy, the Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS) accelerates all TCP-based applications, including common applications, while managing the incremental application-specific latency challenges to minimise the impact of latency on key applications," explains Gary Coetzee, Managing Director of Rapid Technologies.
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