Pretoria, 17 Jun 2009
One of South Africa's largest black-controlled, diversified mining companies, Exxaro, has optimised its bandwidth - seeing a total reduction in WAN and LAN data of 61% and a peak data reduction of 76% over a period of seven months - in a project rolled out with the assistance of IT services and solutions provider, Datacentrix.
The company also increased network capacity by more than two-and-a-half times over this period.
According to Richard Tsalavoutas, solution specialist at Datacentrix,Exxaro's implementation of Riverbed Steelhead appliances and NetScout nGenius Performance Manager, provided the company with visibility of traffic traversing across the WAN infrastructure, broken down into the various specific protocols and measuring the application response time between the sites, allowed it the increased operational efficiency and enabled improved capacity management.
“The project also provided Exxaro with the ability to differentiate between transported applications and recognise network activities," he explains.
“The combination of the Riverbed and NetScout solutions presents a product set that is ideal for application acceleration and network and application performance analysis, assisting businesses like Exxaro to optimise network and application performance by accelerating their applications over the WAN, without any loss of visibility or performance."
The project was rolled out across 11 offices countrywide and affected Exxaro's Web-based http traffic, e-mail as well as SAP and other enterprise applications.
“Essentially, the project was embarked upon because we needed to improve the performance of our applications over the WAN as well as meet the increasing demands of a more mobile workforce," says Chris Smith, principal architect at Exxaro. "Like many South African businesses, Exxaro suffered from insufficient, expensive bandwidth, with remote offices finding slower backup and replications rates most challenging.
“Exxaro had the first Riverbed implementation in South Africa, when its products were still branded as HP,” Smith states. “We saw tremendous value in this solution, so it made perfect sense for us to expand the installation further. Other competitive products we looked at could only handle compression and did not have caching facilities.
“We have enjoyed a long-term relationship with Datacentrix so it made sense to partner with them for this rollout," he explains. "Datacentrix understands our business and knows which products will and won't work for us. In fact, we would go as far as to say that we have more of an equal partnership with them, where both entities are striving for a win-win situation.”
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