Coalminer centralises servers

NSW mining operation Donaldson Coal has deployed a Juniper WAN Acceleration solution from NSC Group to enhance file transfer performance between head office, three remote mines and one remote administration centre.

Terje Petersen, Business Systems Manager for Donaldson Coal, says managing servers across multiple sites was previously problematic for a multitude of environmental reasons. The protocol acceleration and data caching capability of Juniper WAN accelerators have allowed Donaldson Coal to centralise all servers to a single data centre in Sydney.

The data reduction on the WAN is typically more than 80% and the now spare bandwidth along with features such as QoS have allowed the introduction of new services such as high-quality videoconferencing with no additional expenditure on bandwidth. The Juniper solution provides Donaldson Coal with a near 600% average capacity increase and enables the 8 Mbps data links to burst to effective speeds exceeding 60 Mbps. The WAN accelerators make it easy to handle large AutoCAD files.

Donaldson Coal is also enjoying the additional benefits of improved administration and reporting functionality. According to Matt Sully, head of NSC Network Solutions, the Juniper WXC application acceleration platform provides a cost-effective solution to Donaldson Coal - accelerating its business-critical applications, as well as voice, video and terminal services, over wide area networks, maximising WAN investments and improving application response times for mine office users.

“The Juniper WXC platform ensures critical applications get priority service, increases access to shared resources and improves disaster recovery for Donaldson Coal,” he said.