Energy company eliminates WAN bottleneck

Solid Energy is a major New Zealand energy company and a leading producer of high-quality coal. The company invests in research and commercialisation of new, sustainable forms of energy that use coal and renewable energy sources, such as biomass and biodiesel. Solid Energy has grown significantly over the past five years - in some sites, such as its Stockton open-cast mine on New Zealand’s South Island, employee numbers have increased four-fold during that time - and demands on the company’s IT infrastructure have multiplied.

Christine Dormaar, the Information Services manager at Solid Energy, says that because many of Solid Energy’s sites are located in remote areas of New Zealand, it can be difficult and expensive to get access to high-speed wide area network (WAN) connectivity at such sites.

“Over the last few years, our number of employees in remote locations has grown substantially and our IT systems have become more advanced,” said Dormaar. “Unfortunately, the telcos simply cannot supply any more bandwidth to us out at these remote sites.

“We knew that we needed to find an alternative solution to boost application performance, without requiring additional bandwidth.”

Solid Energy looked into WAN optimisation technology as a possible solution to this problem. Following a recommendation from its integration partner Gen-i, Solid Energy performed a production network test of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances between three of its sites - the Christchurch head office, the Stockton site and the Westport project office. These three sites run similar applications and exchange large amounts of data, so they were ideal locations to test the solution.

Dormaar says that the company ran a benchmark test using sample data and ‘file transfer’ and‘file copy’ operations from its key IT applications. Solid Energy compared network performance and application response time both before and after the Steelhead appliances were installed. She says that the results for the file copy tests were staggering.

“All the results improved dramatically, but the file copy test results were particularly impressive - improving by up to 700%,” Dormaar recalls.

Following the production test, Solid Energy chose to purchase and install Steelhead appliances at the three test sites in December 2008, and has continued to see impressive results in its production network ever since.

“As an example of how things have improved since we installed Riverbed WAN optimisation, a 7 MB file that used to take about four minutes to transfer now takes just three seconds - it’s great how we can do this with no extra bandwidth. Also, it’s very reassuring to see that the products work in production just as well as they did in testing.”

Dormaar says the Riverbed Steelhead appliances have been very simple to integrate into the company’s existing IT infrastructure. “We did harbour some initial concerns about the VoIP traffic that we run at our Stockton site, but it runs across the accelerated network with no problems at all,” she explains.

According to Dormaar, the implementation of Riverbed WAN optimisation technology has created an opportunity for IT consolidation. “If people can access information in seconds rather than minutes, it doesn’t matter where the information is physically located. This means we can take a serious look at consolidating some of our remote IT infrastructure, which could also benefit our data backup and disaster recovery plans.

“We also appreciate the detailed reporting that the Steelhead appliances provide about our network traffic - this is very useful information that we didn’t have before. Additionally, we feel very comfortable with the technical support capabilities of both Riverbed and Gen-i, particularly for us with sites in such remote locations,” said Dormaar.