It's hard to imagine in this day and age that bandwidth availability could be a problem for a business. After all affordable fiber is everywhere, right? If you're in a major downtown area, it's all but guaranteed, right?
I wish. Let me tell you a story.
Each of our offices is located in a historical building with no fiber access. Adding pain to suffering, in each location, all last-mile connectivity is owned, operated and overpriced by telecom monopolies. We're not done, though - not even the most prolific of alternative last mile carriers are willing to take a risk and build out to any of our offices. These buildings are ideal in every way except their fiber deficiency. Great location, unique Architecture and opportunities to really impress our clients and give our staff an amazing environment to work in. What could be so bad, right?
Sadly, technology leaves historical buildings in the dust. Or does it? You see, we're an integrated Architecture firm using the latest and greatest Building Information Modeling technology. This stuff takes some serious bandwidth to make work. 100MB between offices with no latency would be nice. Add to that the need to sync 1-2 gigs of data daily between offices for disaster recovery, a few chatty Exchange servers, huge CIFS-based file servers and a few legacy apps. That's a little more than our copper MPLS can handle on it's own.
So what do you do? Move? Carrier Pigeons? Bike Messengers?
One word: Riverbed.
We installed Riverbeds in each of our 3 locations. Now, keep in mind - we have an MPLS WAN with all our Internet coming in through it, too. 1.5MB in our smallest office, 3MB in our medium sized office and 10MB in our headquarters. That's not a lot of bandwidth to work with. We've got many gigs of data to shoot back and forth between offices in any given week.
I think this following graphic tells it all:
In a 30 day's time, we're sending Nearly 700GB of data between offices. Thanks to the Riverbed, only 80GB was actually transferred over the line.
Why Riverbed? Because we didn't have to change how we work and we didn't have to move (phew!) Staff still open files where they rest on the file server. Applications don't have to be 'distributed' between offices or re-written. Application software that doesn't support a WAN (such as AutoDesk Revit) now works well enough to enable cross-office teams.
Most importantly: Moving 3 offices would have cost a lot more than investing in 3 Riverbeds.
Greg Moore
IT Director
SRG Partnership, Inc.
