Intersport optimises virtual environment with Expand Networks

Expand Networks, the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, announces that Intersport International has implemented its Virtual Accelerator (VACC) to optimise SAP, videoconferencing and other critical applications between its headquarters in Switzerland and China. Benefiting from a fully virtualised WAN optimisation solution, Intersport is already experiencing 35% acceleration during the test phase, and now plans to extend the solution to its Hong Kong office.

Intersport International is the brand management and purchasing company of the Intersport Group, which has more than 5 300 associated retailers in 39 countries. The FMCG industry requires them to constantly share and update information on brands, suppliers, purchasing, and market rates. The performance of the WAN is critical to this; however, the company experienced challenges in network reliability and key application performance.

Jicky Li, Network Administrator at Intersport International, comments: “Connectivity in China was not stable, and we were experiencing inconsistent network performance for overseas bandwidth. This impacted productivity, and slowed critical communication between our international offices. This was particularly prevalent with SAP, but also other data traffic such as file-sharing and e-mail communications.”

Intersport also highlighted its use of video conferencing for internal communications, also used to communicate with large brands such as Nike, as a key challenge for WAN performance. Evaluating products from Juniper, Riverbed and F5, Expand was chosen for its virtualised form factor and superior ability to accelerate and prioritise all applications.

“Having made an investment into creating a wholly virtualised environment at Intersport, it was critical that any new software must fully support VMware in order to match the virtual network. Expand was the only product to provide this,” commented Li.

Expand's Virtual Accelerators live within, and accelerate out of, virtual environments. By leveraging the existing virtual infrastructure at Intersport, Expand's WAN optimisation technology is deployed as a “virtual image”. Delivering the most advanced levels of VMware integration, Intersport can use VMware's suite of services to simply deploy, manage, maintain and assure the Expand Accelerator Image within their existing virtualised infrastructure.

“After we installed Expand, traffic was smooth and user experience consistent,” Li explained. “The virtualised system in China now runs like a LAN. Expand has also made a difference to senior execs, regularly travelling between international offices. For them, connecting to the Exchange Server in our Swiss HQ was difficult and slow, but with Expand's compression techniques, this pain point has been eliminated.”

Intersport has completed the implementation of Expand Networks' Virtual Accelerators between its Swiss HQ and China. Based on the early success of the deployment, Li and his team are now planning to extend the solution to its Hong Kong office later this year.