A Riverbed Technology White Paper Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Wide-Area Data Services

Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Wide-Area

Data Services

Rev 1.0 – 04/16/08

© 2008 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 0

 Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Wide-Area Data Services

CUTTING COSTS WITH WIDE AREA DATA SERVICES

Introduction
Organizations of all sizes strive to be more productive and run low cost operations. Particularly in difficult economic times, many
organizations will evaluate various cost-cutting initiatives in order to weather the storm. However, enterprises need to be careful
to pursue cost cutting measures that won’t negatively impact day-to-day operations or constrain long term growth. Employees
need to do their jobs more efficiently than before, so it is vital to keep IT infrastructure up-to-date. Ideally, organizations should
not make deep cuts in investments that may jeopardize future growth, such as product improvements or hiring of key personnel.

Much has been written about wide area data services (WDS) and its ability to improve productivity and collaboration across the
enterprise. However, WDS investments can often be justified solely on the basis of cost savings. These cost savings can be
achieved without negatively impacting operations – in fact, in most instances WDS helps organizations run better while cutting
costs. Riverbed has over 3500 customers, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, who are using our WDS
solutions to reduce costs while improving productivity. Many Riverbed customers have seen a return on investment in just a few
months because of the significant hard cost savings in areas such as bandwidth reduction and IT consolidation.

This paper explores how enterprises can use Riverbed solutions to cut hard costs and make the most of their existing
infrastructure, without negatively impacting their operations.

What is Wide Area Data Services?

Riverbed is the pioneer and market and technology leader in WDS - the first comprehensive solution to a host of problems that
plague enterprise applications operating across the wide area network (WAN) including:

• Poor application performance in distributed environments

• Insufficient, expensive or congested network bandwidth into remote offices
• Difficulties in successful IT consolidation
• Challenges with slow remote data backup and replication
• Increasing demands of the mobile workforce

Using WDS solutions from Riverbed, enterprises can improve application performance across the network typically by five to 50
times and in some cases up to 100 times, and can simultaneously reduce WAN bandwidth utilization by 65 to 95%. These
dramatic results allow businesses to take advantage of their networks, infrastructure, and applications in ways they had never
imagined possible.

WDS solutions accelerate applications by taking an integrated approach to application performance across the WAN. While
some approaches solely focus on network optimization, or just concentrate on acceleration for a specific application, WDS
improves the performance of all applications running over TCP and also has application-specific modules that address chatty
application protocols. This combination enables WDS solutions to accelerate the applications that enterprises care about most,
and provides the ability to easily add more functionality over time.

WDS products are architected to scale all the way from the largest data centers with clustered appliances down to software on a
single user's laptop (or desktop). For organizations looking to optimize branch office operations, Riverbed offers a full line of
Steelhead Appliances that can be easily integrated into a customer’s network. There are thirteen models of Steelhead
Appliances to choose from, based on the bandwidth to the site in question, the amount of data being used, and the number of
desired TCP connections (roughly proportional to the number of users). For enterprises that want to improve productivity for
their mobile workers, Riverbed also offers Steelhead Mobile software, which can be installed on a user’s laptop to optimize that
mobile user’s communications with the data center. In effect, Steelhead Mobile software turns a user’s laptop into a Steelhead
Appliance, so that mobile users can enjoy the same performance benefits as workers in a Steelhead-enabled branch office.

© 2008 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 1

 Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Wide-Area Data Services

Figure 1: Overview of Riverbed’s Solutions

How WDS Helps Companies Cut Costs

Because WDS significantly enhances the performance of applications over WANs, enterprises can realize considerable cost
savings in addition to productivity improvements. IDC found that the average payback period for a Riverbed implementation is
7.3 months.1

Riverbed WDS solutions can cut costs by helping organizations do the following:
• Reduce bandwidth costs. Using Riverbed to improve network performance, many organizations can defer WAN
bandwidth upgrades. WDS projects can often be justified solely on bandwidth savings.
• Consolidate infrastructure into the data center. With WDS, enterprises can remove much of the IT infrastructure
(such as file and email servers, SMS servers, SharePoint servers, tape auto-loaders, and so forth) that sit in branch
offices—without impacting performance.
• Simplify branch office infrastructure. Riverbed offers the RiOS™ Services Platform (RSP), which enables
customers to run best-of-breed services on the Steelhead appliance (such as print, IP address management, and other
services). This allows customers to consolidate their IT even further, making a true “serverless” branch office a reality.
• Optimize disaster recovery. By improving the performance of a disaster
recovery site, WDS can help organizations save money and backup their GeoEngineers, Inc., an environmental
data in a more frequent and reliable manner. consulting firm, had difficulty transferring
files between offices. A typical 720 MB
This paper examines each of these areas in more depth. Specifically, the paper file could take over two hours to transfer
focuses on the hard cost savings that can be achieved with WDS. Productivity from one office to the other. After
improvements, while a very important consideration for a WDS investment, have been deploying Riverbed’s Steelhead
well covered in other materials, and are therefore not the focus of this paper. appliances in 15 offices, this transfer
time was reduced to ten minutes.
Reduce Bandwidth Costs
On average, GeoEngineers has seen a
By deploying Riverbed WDS solutions, many enterprises have avoided purchasing
3.4x to 4x increase in WAN capacity
additional bandwidth. Steelhead appliances on WAN links will typically reduce WAN
with no additional investment in physical
traffic by 65% to 95%. That means an office served by a T1 (1.5 Mbps) could deliver
capacity. Steelhead appliances enabled
bandwidth equivalent to between three and 30 Mbps just by adding Steelhead
the company to get a virtual 155 Mbps
appliances to the WAN link, without any additional investment in infrastructure.
connection on a connection into the data
Bandwidth savings can be significant, and many companies have justified a payback
center that is only 3 Mbps.
period of just a few months on bandwidth savings alone.
As a result, GeoEngineers has been
For example, GeoEngineers, an architectural and design firm, realized bandwidth
able to save about $400K per year in
savings of about $400K per year by deploying Riverbed Steelhead appliances, in
bandwidth costs, and their investment in
addition to significant benefits in terms of employee productivity and collaboration.
Steelhead appliances was paid back in
According to Courtenay Bernier, IT manager at GeoEngineers, “the ROI was obvious
a matter of months.
1
IDC Whitepaper, “Adding Business Value with Wide-area Data Services,” August 2007

© 2008 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 2

 Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Wide-Area Data Services

to executive management, and payback was just a matter of months.” LG Electronics, another Riverbed customer, deployed
Steelhead appliances globally and saves $6M in annual bandwidth costs, generating a payback period of just five months.
Kang-Seok Chung in the IT Infrastructure Group at LG commented: “I wish all IT projects could produce such impressive,
tangible results.”

In addition, the Riverbed Steelhead Mobile product offers further benefits to enterprises in terms of bandwidth reduction. The
workforce is becoming more mobile – IDC forecasts that nearly 75% of the workforce in the US will be mobile by 2011, up from
68% in 2006, and that there will be 1 billion mobile workers worldwide.2 Steelhead Mobile optimizes the connections for these
mobile workers, reducing the amount of bandwidth they consume. Piper Jaffray recently tested the Steelhead Mobile solution
with stellar results: “The performance improvements we achieved with the Steelhead Mobile software client were nothing less
than incredible. We experienced the largest improvements on Microsoft Word and Excel files, with performance increases in
excess of 30x for both file types.” In these tests, Piper Jaffray was able to reduce by 50% the bandwidth required to support
mobile users: “This translates into immediate WAN cost savings.”3

In addition to bandwidth savings, Steelhead Mobile can help companies achieve even more dramatic savings by reducing real
estate and facilities costs. According to one estimate, “virtual” workers cost 60% less than those based at headquarters.4 One
barrier for many organizations in making the workforce more mobile is the difficulty that mobile workers face in accessing key
applications over the WAN. Steelhead Mobile removes this roadblock.

The key to these dramatic improvements in bandwidth utilization is Riverbed data streamlining, which removes repetitive traffic
from the WAN. The data streamlining algorithms store all WAN traffic, in a proprietary form, on disks inside Steelhead products
on both sides of the WAN link. Thereafter, the Steelhead product intercepts any TCP traffic going across the network, to see if
any of that data has been across the network before. If any of it has been sent by any application, then only the new data is sent,
along with references to the existing data.

Enable Remote Site Consolidation

Riverbed WDS solutions also enable consolidation of IT resources and equipment in branch offices and complement server
virtualization initiatives in the data center. Initially, many enterprises placed servers at remote sites to deliver consistent
application performance to remote users working with local data sets. Microsoft Exchange servers, for example, have commonly
been deployed at remote sites with only 20-30 users.

However, provisioning of servers at remote sites is expensive and the resources are often underutilized. Exchange servers, for
example, are typically resourced for a capacity of several thousand users, so deploying a dedicated server for a few dozen
people is very costly. This same issue exists for file servers, and web servers. Worse, all those servers have to be managed,
backed up, repaired, and patched.

By contrast, centralizing servers at a data center delivers clear cost benefits, including:
• Fewer servers to buy, patch, and upgrade
• Less software to buy, maintain, and upgrade
• Lower electricity bills
• Elimination of off-site media storage and management, for organizations that consolidate tape backup
• Elimination of outsourced IT contracts to manage remote servers
• Improved IT staff productivity, including less travel to remote sites for scheduled (or unscheduled) maintenance and
repair

The benefits of centralizing servers are clear – so why hasn’t every organization done it? WAN application performance is the
main stumbling block. Application performance in remote locations would suffer greatly for many organizations if servers were
consolidated in the data center. Typical WAN bandwidth at the edge of a network is only 1% or less of the typical LAN
bandwidth, while latency is often 100 times longer – so while network capacity is 100 times narrower, latency is 100 times
higher.5

Riverbed WDS solutions remove this performance problem and enable organizations to centralize their IT resources. With
Riverbed WDS solutions, organizations no longer need servers at remote sites to provide acceptable performance to their users.
2
“IDC Predicts the Number of Worldwide Mobile Workers to Reach 1 Billion by 2011,” Press Release, www.idc.com, 1/15/08
3
“Steelhead Mobile – Faster Than A Speeding Bullet,” Piper Jaffray, 2/28/08
4
“The Easiest Commute of All,” by Michelle Conlin, Business Week, 12/12/05
5
“Wide Area Data Services: Optimizing the Branch,” The Taneja Group, May 2005.

© 2008 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 3

 Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Wide-Area Data Services

For example, the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), a federal agency with 10,000 employees that manages
contracts valued at more than $1.1 trillion, deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances to enable the consolidation of its data
centers from 17 to two. Lockheed Martin chose Riverbed to enable its global consolidation efforts, enabling 130,000 users to be
supported by a few data centers. An individual at Rohm and Haas, another Riverbed customer, summed up the clear value
proposition of their server consolidation effort: “With WDS for a remote site in North America, the Active Directory replications,
the Notes replications, file backups, they all are fast enough that we don’t have to put a file server on location, which is saving us
more money than the WDS solution costs, so it reduces the payback period to virtually nil.”

WDS also complements server consolidation initiatives that leverage virtualization

technology. Server virtualization allows IT to maximize resource utilization while The U.S. Defense Contract
containing server sprawl to minimize the physical footprint of hardware in data centers. Management Agency (DCMA)
This is a clear win in terms of reducing costs; however, when WANs are involved, deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead WDS
applications that worked well on LANs work poorly, or not at all. Using Riverbed, appliances at 47 sites to enable
enterprises can implement virtualization to consolidate many physical servers in consolidation of IT resources and to
branches down to just a few in a data center, with no performance hit for end-users. reduce the cost and management
Riverbed also enables more flexibility when backing up or moving virtual machines overhead of distributed computing.
from one location to another by dramatically reducing the time it takes to complete
those tasks. Many customers have consolidated servers and sites using Riverbed and When the DCMA consolidated its data
VMware together without their end-users ever knowing applications and data have centers from 17 to twp, upgrades in
been moved hundreds or thousands of miles away. WAN bandwidth were not sufficient –
response times were low and users
were unhappy. The bandwidth
Enable Branch Office Simplification upgrades did not address the issues
In addition to consolidating remote office equipment into the data center, enterprises of chatty protocols and network
can further simplify IT in their branch offices with the RSP, which enables “virtualized latency.
edge services.” As discussed above, Steelhead appliances enable organizations to
pull servers from the branch offices and instead rely on resources at the data center. Within one day, the Steelhead
While this can eliminate much of the equipment in a branch office (such as Microsoft appliances enabled LAN-like
Exchange Servers, file servers, and web servers), branch offices often still need performance for users, reverting to
servers for basic services such as printing and IP address management. pre-consolidation performance levels.
According to Mike Williams, the CIO:
The RSP brings the concept of a true “serverless” branch office one step closer, “Our users are much happier now.
allowing enterprises to further consolidate IT equipment at the branch and reduce Users don’t notice nor do they care
costs. With the RSP, customers can deploy best-of-breed software from other vendors anymore that we've consolidated our
on Steelhead appliances in a self-contained partition, so that they can deliver branch data centers."
office services without separate servers. This means that organizations can run
multiple branch services on a single Steelhead, simplifying administration and streamlining infrastructure. The RSP runs in a
protected zone and does not impact the resource allocations dedicated to maintain peak Steelhead appliance operations.

Fewer servers required to provide services at branch locations can lead to significant savings, particularly for larger
organizations. For example, the list price of a server to supply
The Riverbed Optimization System IP address management in a branch office is about $3200 for 75
– 200 users. In addition, technology purchase costs can be as
little as 20% of the total cost of ownership, according to industry
Data Streamlining
Data Streamlining Transport
Transport Streamlining
Streamlining Application
Application Streamlining
Streamlining analysts.6 So, the TCO of this server could be up to $16,000.
When added up over many branch offices, these figures are
significant: according to IDC, the average mid-size enterprise
RiOS Services Platform (RSP)*

Print
(100 – 999 employees) has 8.7 branches, and the average large
Management Print Streaming Other
Management Streamlining
business (over 1000 employees) has 65.2 branches.7 This
Streamlining Streaming Other
Services
Services Media
Media Services
Services
Visibility,
Visibility, Control,
Control, and
and Monitoring
Monitoring
(DNS/DHCP)
Networking
Networking Security
Security
means that the total cost to deploy and support servers across
(DNS/DHCP)
branches just for IP address management can range from about
Figure 2: The RiOS Optimization System (RSP) allows customers to run $140 K for a mid-size company to over $1 M for a larger
best of breed services on a Steelhead Appliance, in a protected zone. This company.
allows customers to reduce further the number of servers in branch offices.

6
“Network Services in the Branch Office: The ‘True’ Cost of Acquisition,” White Paper from InfoBlox, July 2007
7
“Addressing Operational Inefficiencies in Branch Offices,” White Paper from IDC, May 2006

© 2008 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 4

 Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Wide-Area Data Services

Instead, via the RSP, organizations can now deploy this functionality on a Steelhead appliance already sitting in a branch, and
generate considerable savings. According to Justin Marthaler at Strand Associates (a Riverbed customer), the RSP "will save us
$10,000 to $15,000 in equipment costs for new offices, and that doesn't include the continued cost of maintaining additional
servers.”

Optimize Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery (DR) is an area of growing importance for most organizations. The majority of companies now have some
type of DR site: according to a recent survey by Forrester and the Disaster Recovery Journal, 57% of companies have dedicated
IT infrastructure for disaster recovery purposes.8

Enterprises can use Riverbed WDS solutions to optimize their DR investments in several ways. First, WDS can reduce the cost
of DR operations. Because WDS effectively adds bandwidth capacity to the network, enterprises can spend less on bandwidth
going to the DR site. In addition, with vastly improved data transfer speeds, many organizations can eliminate tape back up in
remote offices and instead back up their data over the WAN.

For example, one of the world’s largest banks with more than 200,000 employees used Riverbed WDS solutions to eliminate
tape backup completely in 2500 branch offices. The network architect at the bank observed: “With Steelhead appliances, our
WAN connections see the equivalent of a 146x capacity increase, which enables us to eliminate tape backup in branch offices.”
A streamlined DR infrastructure can also drive significant productivity improvements in the IT department, as the IT staff no
longer needs to manage tapes that are distributed throughout branch offices.

WDS also enables more frequent and reliable backup and replication. For many organizations, it LITTLE Diversified Architectural
takes hours to complete a full backup and replication cycle. Not only does this consume network Consultants needed to enable more
resources, but it also exposes an organization to significant risk. If there is a failure in the data reliable and faster data backup. Their
center before a full backup is completed, an enterprise can lose a significant amount of data, goal was to create a secure and
which could lead to lost revenue and problems complying with regulations. centralized solution for remote backup,
to remove the risk of losing vital data
For example, LITTLE Diversified Architectural Consulting, an architectural consulting firm with 300 associated with client projects.
employees, is using Riverbed WDS solutions to improve its backup process. Chris France, the
CIO at LITTLE observed: “A single day’s worth of lost data can cost us $200,000. So, as you can By deploying Steelhead appliances,
imagine, data backup is critical for us.” With Riverbed Steelhead appliances, LITTLE was able to LITTLE’s architects and designers have
reduce its backup windows from four hours to just five minutes. Using Riverbed WDS enabled a accelerated access to the freshest data,
more secure and reliable remote backup process that removed the risk of losing vital client data. regardless of their locations. This makes
team collaboration easier, and the
Riverbed WDS can also optimize disaster recovery by enabling dual-use DR. Investments in DR billable hours due to lost data have been
are still relatively small for most organizations. According to the Forrester/Disaster Recovery reduced dramatically.
Journal survey, 45% of respondents spend less than $500K per year on disaster recovery. This is
true particularly for smaller organizations, which are less likely to invest significantly in disaster Backup windows were reduced from
recovery.9 The net result is that the DR site for most organizations is vastly underpowered, and four hours to five minutes, and WAN
therefore not used on a regular basis. bandwidth capacity was increased more
than 3x. As a result, LITTLE saw an
With the Riverbed WDS solutions, the performance of a DR site can be improved significantly by ROI in just six months.
increasing the WAN capacity to the site. With this improved performance, organizations can use
the DR site for other purposes, such as sharing a data center’s workload in peak hours, and turn a previously idle asset into a
productive use of resources. Particularly for larger organizations that have made significant investments, dual use DR is a way
to leverage an existing asset and offset costs. For smaller organizations that are reluctant to invest heavily in DR, dual use DR is
a way to improve disaster preparedness in a cost-effective manner.

Finally, in the event of a disaster, WDS would considerably improve the performance of a DR site. The Riverbed solutions
reduce bandwidth consumption by 65% to 95% and accelerate application performance from five to 50x, even up to 100x in
some cases. For many companies, slowdowns of even a few minutes can have a substantial impact on revenues. With WDS at
the DR site, organizations can ensure sufficient performance when they need it most.

8
“The State of DR Preparedness,” by Forrester and the Disaster Recovery Journal, 2007.
Http://www.drj.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=794&Itemid=159&ed=10
9
ibid

© 2008 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 5

 Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Wide-Area Data Services

Conclusion
Riverbed WDS solutions are a smart investment for any organization, even in tough economic times, because they drive
significant cost savings that often pay for the investment in a matter of months. In addition, customers achieve dramatic
productivity improvements, enabling them to work in ways that were not previously possible. Files that used to take hours to
access now take seconds, and workers around the globe can collaborate as if they were in the same office. With more than
3500 customers across every industry, Riverbed is the clear leader in the WDS marketplace, helping customers cut costs today
and prepare for growth in the future.

Riverbed Technology, Inc. Riverbed Technology Ltd. Riverbed Technology Pte. Ltd. Riverbed Technology K.K.
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www.riverbed.com Tel: +44 1344 354910 Tel: +65 6508-7400 Tel: +81 3 5419 1990

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