| Challenge:
Maintaining Fast, Affordable Wide Area Network Access
Capacity was continuously being stretched to the limit across LG’s corporate network. The company was experiencing increased usage across all locations and all applications. Kang-Seok Chung, senior manager, IT Infrastructure Group, and leader of the Steelhead appliance rollout commented, “More and more data was moving over the network. In addition to increased usage, we have seen a significant increase in the number of internal applications that require network access. To complicate the matter, we found that end users had increasing expectations of network performance.”
LG has offices and employees distributed all over the globe. “With more than 72,000 employees and more than 120 overseas operations including 77 subsidiaries, we have a massive investment in bandwidth and infrastructure. But, as you know international connectivity is both more expensive and higher latency than domestic connectivity. We knew that adding more bandwidth was simply not a viable long-term solution,” recalled Chung. While adding more bandwidth would provide some benefits, he recognized that latency on the network impedes throughput, and a comprehensive solution must overcome both bandwidth limitations and the impact of latency.
Solution:
Steelhead Appliances
In addition to examining the potential for deploying more bandwidth, LG also looked into redesigning many of its new applications. That alternative also proved to be too expensive, and so the company investigated Wide-area Data Services (WDS) products.
Chung and his team performed extensive tests on Peribit (now part of Juniper Networks) and Expand products, as well as the Riverbed Steelhead solution. “The Riverbed Steelhead solution performed better than the competition,” recalled Chung. “It produced the fastest response time of all the technologies tested, and it supported more of our critical protocols. Riverbed did a better job of reducing WAN traffic. Finally, Steelhead appliances were the easiest to manage, which is a critical component to a successful global deployment as large as ours.”
In brief
Challenges
- Control significant bandwidth costs
- Accelerate remote user access to critical applications
Solution
- Global deployment of Riverbed Steelhead appliances
Benefits
· $6 Million US saved annually in bandwidth expenses
· Payback period of just five months in bandwidth savings alone
· Users can access key applications 20 times faster over the WAN
· “All of our critical applications have seen significant acceleration when accessed from remote offices.”
· “The Riverbed Steelhead solution performed better than the competition. It produced the fastest response time of all the tech-nologies tested, and it supported more of our critical protocols.”
Bandwidth Savings and Application Acceleration
LG saw immediate and dramatic benefits from deploying Riverbed Steelhead appliances. “Our critical applications have seen significant acceleration when accessed from remote offices. For example, eNet, our Lotus-based intranet, is 20 times faster than before. The response time for our purchase and inventory system is seven times faster,” remarked Chung. “While our results are slightly different for each application, overall we are very happy with the response time improvements that Riverbed has enabled.”
Before the Steelhead appliance deployment, certain internal applications were simply unusable for employees in remote offices. For example, the Purchase/
Sales/Inventory application could not be accessed from the Vladivostok office previously. After the Steelhead deployment, users could easily access the tool within a few seconds, dramatically improving productivity for the remote office.
LG also saw massive bandwidth savings. “Bandwidth is not cheap for international companies, especially in the Asia Pacific region. But immediately after deploying the Steelhead solution, we saw a reduction in bandwidth utilization of 40% in critical parts of our global network,” said Chung. As a result, Riverbed saves LG a total US $6,000,000 in annual bandwidth expenditures, while creating faster access times for remote employees. In this case, the Riverbed Steelhead appliance has a payback period of just five months based on bandwidth savings alone.
Chung concluded, “I wish all IT projects could produce such impressive, tangible results.”
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