We have a problem. We had about 26 offices spread across the us and canada on an MPLS mesh (not to mention the South american offices that hadn't gotten the uplift to mpls or riverbed.) that we had implemented to centralize file serving in order to have proper IT control over backups. We went with riverbed to optimize WAN traffic, and it did great with CIFS and MAPI, stellar performance across the board. But PDFs were a different matter. Even after riverbed introduced the optimized printing feature in RiOS 6.0, PDF still chugged across the wan.
We were keeping the legacy file servers up at all sites and paying outside vendors to maintain them (all IT staff is centralized in NYC), only to be print servers for PDFs. We were also having trouble managing WSUS download times over the WAN as the updates became larger and more frequent. Sites would lose all connectivity as everyone tried to grab updates during the day. It was time to replace all the servers.
But before we did that, I attended a Riverbed Users Group meeting in Manhattan where the riverbed sales and engineering teams, were describing the RSP platform and said it was built on VMware technology.
Lightbulbs lit up over my head, and 6 months later (purchasing and approvals are this painful at every company, right?) I had RSP running on all of our Steelheads, hosting a virtualized windows server, acting as a printserver, a WSUS repository, and Epo Repository for McAfee updates, and a DFS site for updates like adobe to be pushed via WoL scripts. It saved us about $100,000 in hardware replacement aquisitions, not to mention the network performance improvements or administrative versatility and facility that became available, while reducing our hardware footprint in each branch to just a riverbed (which we needed either direction we went in), a switch, and a vendor managed router. Combining all that on top of excelent WAN acceleration and the incredible level of network insight and detail that you can get by using the riverbed troubleshooting tools on your network was the icing on an already amazing CAKE.
-Mike
